


dance with a devil on your back

by gendernoncompliant



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Duke and Nathan have like 20 years of repressed feelings, Fatherhood, Friends to Lovers, Grief, Happy Ending, Idiots in Love, M/M, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Sad but soft, Slice of Life, Slow Burn, Tender Sex, Trans Character, budding alcoholism, disaster bisexuals, hurt/comfort but both parties are emotionally stunted assholes, mentions of disordered eating, parenting, remember Duke's daughter from season 1? she's back baybee, season 3 alternate ending, spoilers through the end of s3, tender 'n tragic, trans man Nathan, unprecedented levels of sass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-01-24 17:04:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 49,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21341695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendernoncompliant/pseuds/gendernoncompliant
Summary: There was a time when a very deluded, very lonely teenaged version of himself thought maybe he could have that kind of future, with Nathan. A family. The picket fence kind of life. It’s the last time he can remember wanting that for himself. Things blew up with Nathan in a big way and it was the last straw in a long line of broken backs. That heartbroken kid never could have imagined a world with Jean in it.He would, however, be absolutely furious at himself for still chasing after Nathan fucking Wuornos.
Relationships: Audrey Parker/Nathan Wuornos (mentioned), Duke Crocker/Audrey Parker (mentioned), Duke Crocker/Nathan Wuornos
Comments: 119
Kudos: 86





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **My usual note on the trans Nathan tag: I am a trans person and am pulling from my real, lived experiences. I've seen the character as trans since episode one, and it hugely informs how I write him and the way he interacts with the world.  
In this case, this is a story WITH a trans person, not about BEING a trans person.  
This piece is very Duke-centric, and Nathan's gender has little to no bearing on the early chapters, but may become more relevant as it goes on. But, pivotal or not, it's very important to me.  
  
Title is from "Shake It Out" by Florence + the Machine, because I have a Florence AESTHETIC to maintain with my Haven fic, at this point.

Audrey walks into the barn. The troubles end. Duke and Nathan are left to pick up the pieces.

Whenever they’re together, grief is like another person in the room. It sits in all the places Audrey used to—chitters in the silence, pours itself a drink. It’s awful. Being apart is worse. When they’re apart, grief isn’t _in _the room, it _is _the room.

That first night, Duke buries himself in a bottle and Nathan sees how long he can leave his hand on the stove before the pain overwhelms him.

In the absence of her, every kind of feeling hurts.

Duke is still nursing his hangover when Nathan shows up at the Rouge, the next day, drunk. There might be a kind of humor in the irony of it if Nathan weren’t so red-faced and furious, pushing past him and into the cabin.

“No, by all means,” Duke drawls, still standing in the doorway. “Come in.” He closes the door, turning to watch Nathan pace the floor like an angry cat.

“You let her go,” Nathan snarls. He’s hounding for a fight, his whole body electric with it, but Duke isn’t interested in screaming at the one person he has left.

There’s no point in making excuses, now. She’s gone, and Duke was the one who convinced Nathan to stop fighting for her.

Regardless of what Nathan thinks, he doesn’t have a monopoly on hating Duke for that.

“Yeah,” Duke says, voice just a little cracked down the center. “I did.”

Nathan recoils, shocked into temporary silence. It doesn’t—can’t—last; he’s vibrating with too much energy, pacing the floor in a rage, looking around like he’s trying to find some way to get Duke to rise to the bait.

He’s all unearned righteous fury when he snarls, “You don’t even _care_, do you?”

Duke feels a decade older than he did a week ago. And he’s had this argument with himself too many times in the last twenty-four hours to have it again with Nathan, now.

“Even you aren’t _that _stupid,” he retorts, but there’s no real heat to it. He catches Nathan’s wrist to stop the pacing and Nathan teeters on his center of balance, barely avoiding tipping over.

“Hey,” Duke asks, kinder this time, “You eat anything _besides _whiskey, today?”

Nathan yanks his arm away and slurs, “Don’t touch me.”

Putting up his hands in surrender, Duke retreats to the fridge. “I’m making dinner. Scream at me all you want, just sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

It seems to disarm Nathan—or, at least, disorient him. He twists into a frown and, after a moment, slowly lowers himself into the booth. Nathan fidgets in a way Duke isn’t used to, anymore. He chews his lip, runs his hands over his face, picks at the bandage around his palm. It occurs to Duke that the world must be in technicolor for him—everything bright and new in the wake of the troubles. He catches himself staring at the bandage and wonders if Nathan is even able to see losing his trouble as a blessing, considering what he had to give up.

They’re both quiet for a while, nothing but the sound of sizzling oil in the pan to fill the quiet. They spent most of their lives navigating each other without Audrey, but somehow doing it now seems impossible.

Grief rears its head in the strangest ways. Ridiculously, Nathan showing up to yell at him is manageable—exhausting, but manageable—but when Duke opens the cabinet to find her favorite mug staring back at him, it lands like a blow to the chest. He makes a strangled sound and pushes it to the rear of the cupboard, out of sight, blinking away the threat of tears. He keeps his back turned to Nathan so he doesn’t have to explain himself while he walks himself back from the edge of something bottomless.

Nathan must hear it, though—the way his breath hitches. Duke wonders if it’s mercy or apathy that keeps him from calling him on it.

But that isn’t fair.

Nathan isn’t half as indifferent about him as he wants everyone to think. Duke’s known that for years.

“I tried to go to work,” Nathan says, breaking the silence. He’s more fragile than Duke’s ever seen him. Small in a way he doesn’t recognize. He runs a hand through his hair, eyes locked on the table, and continues, “I kept—expecting her to walk in.”

Duke’s been avoiding the Gull for the same reasons. “Doesn’t feel real,” he agrees.

Nathan drags his palms across the tabletop, against the grain of the wood, in a way that borders on reverent. “It’s real,” Nathan murmurs, not looking at him. Not really looking at anything. He’s sitting at Duke’s kitchen table, but his thoughts are somewhere far away—with Audrey.

Duke drags him out of his stupor by setting a plate of food down in front of him. “C’mon, big guy,” he sighs, “You’ll feel better if you eat.”

“You loved her, too,” Nathan says; there’s something sharp to his voice, but it’s too fragile to call it a snarl. “Why are you okay?”

Duke sits down across from him and stares, a kind of sorrow on his face that Nathan must read as pity, even when it isn’t.

“One of us has to be,” Duke answers, his voice a little raw. “Guess it’s my turn.”

* * *

Duke told Arla he’d never been in love. It was twice a lie.

His love for Audrey, he wore on his sleeve. Duke adored her from the moment he met her. He was transparent. All she had to do was smile at him and he’d follow her into the jaws of death. (And he almost did.)

When it came to Nathan, that love was buried a little deeper: overgrown with old hurt and the kinds of mistakes they don’t make Hallmark cards for. But a love like that? Twenty years in the making? It grows like a weed—damn near impossible to kill, stubbornly blooming underneath it all.

* * *

“You sure you wanna do this?” Duke ties the boat to the pier, casting an uncertain look at Nathan over his shoulder. “Not too late to turn around.”

Nathan nods, looking back at him for only a moment before turning his gaze to the line of trees. “It’s the closest thing she has to a grave.”

“She isn’t dead.”

Duke gives the knot one final tug before he’s satisfied. Kick’em Jenny Neck looks the same as ever—wild and untouched. He doubts anyone has gone anywhere near it since the barn disappeared. No one who knew anything about the troubles would want anything to do with it and no one who didn’t would have reason to go. No one except the two of them, apparently.

“She is, though,” Nathan says, his voice flat. It’s the utter hopelessness of it that gets to Duke: this aimless, bottomless grief that renders Nathan unrecognizable.

“No,” Duke argues, following him into the trees. “No, it’s a cycle. Another twenty-seven years and—”

“And what, Duke?” Nathan comes to a stop, turning to look at him with an expression that’s tired in a way sleep won’t cure. It roots Duke to the spot. “Whoever comes out of that barn in thirty years—it’s not gonna be Audrey.”

Duke feels dizzy. Nathan was always, always fighting. Always looking for a way. Duke knew that losing Audrey had rattled him, but he didn’t think he’d given up.

“She’ll be in there, though,” Duke pushes, but his voice sounds small even to his own ears, “underneath it all.”

Nathan makes a soft sound and turns back to the trail, brushing aside branches to carve his path. “Lucy wasn’t. Or Sarah.”

Nathan seems, all at once, directionless and driven. He moves through the woods with purpose, but there’s an awful _nothingness _behind his eyes, like he’s pushing forward on pure instinct. Like he’s following a script and it’s running out of pages.

Duke’s cautious when he says, “I don’t think this is good for you, man.”

There’s something bordering on humor in Nathan’s hollow tone when he says, “You’re the one who drove the boat.”

Duke huffs a sound that’s almost a laugh as he follows behind him. “Look, if this is what you need to do, it’s what you need to do. I’m just saying, nobody’s gonna think any less of you if we end this little road trip here.”

“Too late.”

They crest the hill and break through the trees. Beneath them, laid out in the white light of mid-afternoon, is a patch of dead grass where the barn once stood—the only signpost of all the things they lost.

“Stay here, if you want,” Nathan says over his shoulder as he stumbles down the steep slope.

“Yeah, right,” Duke grumbles to an audience of no one.

It’s funny, in a cosmic sort of way. When they were kids, Nathan was the one nipping at his heels, following him into trouble. But ever since Audrey came to town, it seems like it’s always Duke who’s in lockstep behind _him_.

Just a short, silent hike and then they’re standing in the same place they stood a few weeks ago, when everything was different.

“Should we—? Pick flowers? Say a few words?” It comes out sharper, less sincere, than Duke means it to. “Sorry,” he counters immediately, ducking his head and scuffing his boot through the dirt. “I just don’t know what we’re doing here, Nate. This place creeps me out.”

He rocks on his heels, arms crossed tight over his chest. He doesn’t want to be here, in this place, with the ghosts of that day.

“You wanna wait by the boat?”

“No,” Duke says simply, because it’s easier than admitting that he’s not willing to leave Nathan alone, here. It means the same thing in the end, anyway.

Nathan sits down in the dirt, knees pulled up, gaze fixed on the place where the barn used to be. He’s quiet for a long time—utterly still while Duke hovers a few feet away from him, watching the tree line. Duke doesn’t pace, but he fidgets—picks at the hem of his clothes, wrings his hands, shifts back and forth on his feet. Whatever peace Nathan seems to find here leaves Duke, instead, unsettled. Guilt, nausea, regret—they all roil just below his skin.

It feels too much like a crime scene. Sterile and haunted and empty.

“She was right here,” Nathan says softly, without looking up. Duke feels his chest go tight. He remembers exactly what she looked like, standing in the door and saying her goodbyes. The memory feels so real, so fresh, he could almost reach out and touch it.

He doesn’t say anything because there’s nothing to say. After a pause, Nathan looks up at him and asks, “Do you miss her?”

“That’s a stupid question,” Duke sighs, his voice gentle. He tucks his hands into his coat pockets. “Every day.” He huffs a small, humorless laugh. “More every day, honestly.”

Nathan cracks something that might be a smile and jokes, “I’ve heard it’s supposed to get easier.”

“Yeah,” Duke murmurs, eyes on the dirt. “Not with her.”

Nathan’s brow furrows and he swallows around the lump in his throat. “Yeah,” he agrees, voice thin. “Not with her.”

Duke doesn’t mean to be quite so goddamn earnest when he says, “You know you’re all I got left in this Podunk town?”

Nathan laughs. It’s the brightest sound he’s made in weeks. “That’s pretty pathetic,” he drawls, and Duke laughs too.

“Yeah. Yeah it is.”

Duke isn’t sure how long they stay there, in that field where their whole world went to hell. But the sun is lower in the sky when they climb back into the skiff and make for the mainland.

They don’t talk the whole way back, but when they dock, Duke asks, “Was that—what you wanted?”

Nathan’s quiet for a moment, watching the water. “Yeah,” he says finally. “I think so.” He steps onto the pier and makes it about halfway down it before he turns back to add, “Thanks. For coming.”

“Yeah,” Duke says, voice catching in his throat. “Anytime.”

* * *

Duke starts sleeping on Nathan’s couch. Not all the time. Couple nights a week—more, if things are truly bad. The thing is, neither one of them is okay and they don’t know how to talk about it in a way that makes any difference. They grate against each other in the same way they always have, but these days when they start fights, they’re small, petty things—quick to blow over.

The fact is, being around Nathan is easier than being away from him and, in the end, not even his own pride is worth white-knuckling the grief alone.

Duke starts making food more often when it becomes clear how little interest Nathan has in eating. Nathan gives him rides to the Gull on the days when getting dressed and facing the world feels absolutely fucking impossible.

It isn’t perfect. It isn’t even comfortable, but it’s all they have. A few months in, and Nathan gets an extra set of keys made and Duke resolutely doesn’t allow himself to read too far into it. He won’t let his own loneliness make a fool out of him.

Duke does his drinking where Nathan can’t see it—usually at the Gull, on and off throughout the evening. Never enough that the patrons would start to gossip. Nathan, for the most part, doesn’t drink. But when he does, it’s at home, alone, and heavy.

Sometimes Duke swings by (Duke refuses to call Nathan’s place _home_—reminds himself to treat it as a place he visits, not a place he _lives_) and finds Nathan curled up in lonely corners of the house, plastered. More often than not he’s surly and belligerent, but tonight—haloed in the dim light of the hall lamp—he’s oddly pliant.

He’s all loose, cut-puppet-strings when Duke heaves him to his feet. “You mean to hit the ground, here?” Duke asks with the kind of practiced patience of someone who deals with drunks for a living. “Or did you just run out of steam?”

Nathan either doesn’t hear his question or doesn’t care about it. “She told me you needed me,” he slurs, cheerful and obtuse, in Duke’s face.

“Buddy,” Duke sighs, exhausted. He’s not exactly sober either. Never is, these days. Hasn’t been, actually, for a long time. He tries to shift Nathan’s weight so they can both maneuver out of the narrow hallway without Nathan losing his balance. “What are you talking about?”

“Audrey,” Nathan chimes. His head lolls on his shoulders, but Duke catches sight of the lazy smile on his face. Oddly content for a man talking about the lost love of his life. “She said,” the words come out stilted, “that you needed me. But—the funny thing is—‘nd it’s really funny—M’the one who keeps needing you.”

Duke chest goes a little tight and he squeezes Nathan’s arm as he leads him to his room. “Nah,” he counters, keeping his tone light. “I just hold my liquor better than you do.”

“You don’t have to stay here, for me,” Nathan says, chasing a completely new train of thought, and Duke isn’t sure if the reason he’s having trouble keeping up is because he’s too sober or too drunk.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” he says, bracing Nathan with a hand on his chest before he has the chance to tilt himself off-balance. “Sleeping on your couch is fucking up my back.”

Helping Nathan perch on the edge of the bed involves a lot of rearranging his limbs, like he’s some kind of unwieldy department store mannequin. Never mind never having _seen _him this drunk, Duke is pretty sure Nathan’s never _been _this drunk.

“No,” Nathan insists as he veers off to one side, “I mean _here_.”

Duke sighs. He’s getting the feeling maybe he _shouldn't_ leave Nathan on his own, tonight. “I’m not following, dude.”

“In Haven. Know you probably wanna—” Nathan makes a dramatic motion, hand carving through the air between them. “Sail into the sunset, or whatever. S’kinda what you do.”

The fact that Nathan doesn’t seem to mean that last part as an insult just makes it sting more. He’s not wrong. There’s a version of Duke that would have taken losing Audrey as an excuse to leave and never come back. But he’s not that person anymore, and he isn’t entirely sure when he _stopped _being that person.

Duke surprises the both of them when the first thing out of his mouth is a tired, “Do you want me to leave?”

Nathan frowns, considering the question. It takes him a comically long time, given how drunk he is. Duke fights the urge to smile. It’s not funny. It isn’t.

“No,” he says, finally, flopping back against the headboard. “I don’t think so.”

Duke does laugh, then. “Yeah, alright. I’ll take that. So, you want something to eat or you just gonna sleep it off?”

Nathan’s frown deepens and he makes a frustrated sound. “I can feed myself, you know.”

“Mm-hm, we’re all very impressed.” He nudges Nathan with his foot. “Now answer the question.”

Nathan sighs up at the ceiling and is quiet for a moment before surrendering with an exasperated, “Yeah. I could eat.”

Duke claps him on the knee and heads for the kitchen. “Eggs it is. Bring your drunk ass to the kitchen.” He’s already out the door, but he pops his head back in to add, “And bring whatever you were drinking. Figure if I start catching up now, we can meet in the middle.”

* * *

Duke doesn’t move in, exactly. He’s still sleeping on the couch. All his clothes and toiletries are still on the Rouge. He’s still showering there. It’s not the same as living together, that’s what he keeps telling himself. But really, it’s all semantics, at this point.

He can pretend he’s doing it for Nathan’s sake, but the truth is: everything feels empty without Audrey. The Gull, even the Rouge. He never minded being alone, before. Hell, he used to revel in it. He doesn’t have a stomach for it, anymore.

_Audrey, she said you needed me._

Duke’s not even sure Nathan remembers telling him that, but the words rattle around his head for weeks. She knew them so well. (Loved them so well.) He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to ever get over her.

* * *

When the reality of what life without the troubles means _really _hits him, the first thing he feels is shame. The guilt should be enough to move him to action, but it paralyses him, instead. He spends the next three days trying to bury the thought, move through his life like usual. Fear and excitement and giddy anxiety get so mixed up inside him, he can’t pry them apart from each other.

He doesn’t tell Nathan. He doesn’t tell anyone.

He has the phone number he needs to call. He knows what he needs to say. But every time he pulls out his phone, he clams up. It’s like panic and hope are having an arm-wrestling match in his chest and neither one is winning.

After another day spent stuck between hope and a hard place, he leaves work early. He heads to Nathan’s on autopilot, but quickly changes course to the Rouge, instead. Nathan _should _be at work, but Duke’s resolve is fragile enough as it is without Nathan walking in and shattering whatever might be left of it.

It takes him damn near half an hour of pacing and worrying and trying to talk himself out of it to finally call.

The woman who answers the phone has a kind voice and a gentle twang to her accent. It occurs to Duke—not for the first time—that he owes her his life.

“Hi,” he says, trying desperately to keep his voice calm and cheerful and steady when he doesn’t feel like any of those things. His palms are sweating. “I, uh—I’m sorry to bother you. My name’s Duke Crocker? I’m—yeah. Yeah, that Duke Crocker.” He tries to laugh, but it feels like he’s got poprocks in his lungs. “Listen, um. I know I haven’t been in touch. I know I probably should have been. I don’t, um—things have changed and I… I really wanna meet her. If that’s okay.”

She doesn’t know it—or maybe she does—but the woman on the phone has his heart in the palm of her hand. This, more than anything he’s ever done in his life, is a leap of faith.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Infinite love and adoration to @crownedcarl for all the hours we spent screaming about this AU, and to @sahraylia, who saved my life betaing this fic.
> 
> *There’s a possibility the rating on this will change; I haven’t decided exactly what direction I’m taking later chapters in.*


	2. Chapter 2

Audrey was the one who found Eliza and Richard Olsen.

They were the perfect fit. Their family was from Haven, originally, but they’d been in Nebraska for a few generations. Still, it was recent enough that they’d heard stories about the troubles, although the Olsen’s themselves didn’t seem to have any.

Audrey hadn’t gone into the details with them, only that a particularly unpleasant trouble meant that the baby needed to be out of Haven, and that she couldn’t ever get anywhere near her father. She left the rest up to him. Duke’s had their number for years, now.

_Can't miss what you never had_, he’d told Audrey, back then, with an unconvincing smile plastered across his face. If she’d known he was lying, she did him the courtesy of pretending.

He thought about Jean all the time, especially in that first year.

He used to pull up the Olsen’s phone number and stare at it: thought about asking how she was doing, for pictures, anything. But, back then, he was still living in a world where the troubles might never go away. Having even the smallest piece of her in his life without getting to meet her? It would be torture.

Duke never wanted to be a father. 'Family' never exactly did him any favors. He didn’t know the first thing about being a dad and he sure as hell wasn’t interested in leaving some poor kid as messed up as his old man left him. But he always thought that, at the very least, if he ever _did _wind up knocking someone up, he could at least _show up_ for the kid. It’s more than his parents ever did.

There’s a kind of cosmic cruelty to the fact that the troubles forced him into being an absent father, anyway.

* * *

Half-asleep Nathan makes coffee the way Duke imagines a reanimated corpse might dig his own grave. He’s never particularly friendly first thing in the morning, but it’s less of a focused irritation and more of a generalized disgust. These days, Duke finds the familiar image almost comforting. When Duke steps into the kitchen, Nathan grunts what he assumes is supposed to be a good morning. They sit in amicable silence while the coffee brews.

He'd never admit it, but some part of Duke finds Nathan's groggy irritation almost endearing. For all his prickliness, there's something soft about him when he's like this, but maybe that's just the bedhead.

When the coffee beeps, Nathan gravitates back towards it like a fish on a hook. He pours Duke a cup before his own, and there’s something about that simple gesture that ties a knot in Duke’s throat.

Their fingers brush when he takes the mug and Nathan doesn’t flinch away, anymore.

“Hey, uh” Duke starts. He retreats to the relative safety of the fridge—to grab milk for his coffee—but finds himself hovering in front of it, using the open door like some kind of shield between himself and Nathan. “I’m gonna be gone for a few days.”

There’s no good reason why this should be so hard to talk about, and yet his hands clam up at the thought of having to admit to it, out loud. Calling her his kid—honestly, he doesn’t feel like he has any right.

“Yeah?” Nathan asks, casting a glance at him that only lasts a few seconds before he finds something to do with his hands. He straightens the countertop, but it’s obvious busywork. He’s just rearranging what’s already there—the coffee filters, the can of grounds, the sugar bowl they never actually use. There’s a visible tension in his shoulders when he asks, “You doing another run?”

It’s no secret that Nathan doesn’t approve of Duke’s work in—imports. Although, Duke does less and less of it these days and the work he does pick up is almost always entirely above board. Even so, he spent enough years hustling that Nathan bristles at any indication of it. Duke wants to be frustrated by it, but, in all fairness, _Detective Wuornos _has been looking the other way for years.

Stupid of him, going and falling for a fucking cop.

Duke forces himself out of the makeshift barricade he’s made of the fridge, setting the milk down on the counter and trying to look calmer than he feels. “No, it’s—Nebraska, actually.”

“Nebraska.” Nathan quirks an eyebrow. The tension drains out of his shoulders and something like a smile plays across his face. “You finally lose it and decide to go corn farmer on me?”

Duke laughs, even if it comes out a canned and nervous thing. “Not yet. No, it’s uh. It’s—my kid.”

“Your what?” Nathan asks, before realization dawns on his face and colors it with shock. “Holy shit, your daughter.”

_Your daughter_. The words sound just as strange in Nathan’s mouth as they do in his own. He isn’t sure he’ll ever get used to it.

Duke keeps his head down and watches the milk stir into his coffee as he says, “Her name’s Jean.”

It still feels impossible—surreal, like some kind of dream. The unreality of it isn’t helped by the fact that nothing about Jean’s birth was normal: that she appeared into the world in just a couple days instead of months and that he’s only ever seen her in pictures.

Nathan’s wearing his characteristic frown, although it’s more thoughtful than disapproving. “How do you know where she is?” He asks. “I didn’t think you’d—shit, actually this sounds worse than it did in my head. Just. I don’t know. I didn’t think you’d—_want _to know.”

Duke’s voice comes out too cowed, too defeated for his own liking when he murmurs, “C’mon, Nate. Give a guy a little credit.”

“I’m sorry,” Nathan says, and to _his _credit, it seems sincere. Duke can count on one hand the number of times Nathan’s apologized to him in the last decade and actually _meant _it.

He’ll take it, but it still stings.

Nathan sighs and leans against the counter. “I guess I just never thought you wanted that, you know? The—family life. Kids.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so either,” Duke murmurs, crossing his arms in a way that makes him look small. “But she’s here,” he pushes, looking away from Nathan, “She’s—_my kid_. I gotta at least meet her.”

Nathan watches him with this soft expression that just makes Duke want to curl up tighter. “How old is she, now?” He asks.

It feels like a lifetime ago—the lighthouse, those first few cases with Audrey. The early days of the troubles. Haven’s so quiet, these days, it almost feels fake. Like they’re all just children playing house.

“Closing in on four.”

“Do you—” Nathan starts only to stop himself. He stares down at the floor, weighing a decision that Duke can’t parse. Finally, after what feels like ages, he sighs, “Do you want me to come?” He’s quick to add, “You can say no, it’s not—I’m not trying to overstep. Or, I can ask somebody else if you don’t want it to be me. Dwight or Gloria—” He’s babbling, which is more like _Duke _than like Nathan. Maybe they’re rubbing off on each other. “It just—I don’t know—it seems like maybe you shouldn’t go alone.”

"That's very sweet," Duke teases in a way that's not entirely kind. He's caught somewhere between exasperated and amused when he asks, simply, “Do you _want _to come?”

Nathan fumbles at that. He stares at Duke a little slack-jawed before finally admitting, “Uh—yeah. Yeah. I—uh. I wanna see her, too. You know.” A thread of something like hope coils up warm and tight in Duke’s chest. He watches Nathan turn his mug in his hands as he continues, “She was one of Audrey’s first cases, so…”

All that hope unravels in an instant; he’s left feeling foolish and defeated. Tired, the same way he’s been tired since the day they lost her. The same way he’s been tired for years, if he’s honest.

He shouldn’t be surprised. Audrey was always the reason. He tells himself he isn’t jealous, but he's not fooling anyone.

He misses her, too, is the frustrating part. He loved her, too.

He wonders if it’s pathetic or just predictable (or both) that he’s dying for the company even when he knows it isn’t about him.

“Yeah, you can come. Haven’t even bought the plane tickets yet, so.”

“I can take a few days off. It’s not like they need me at the station, anyway. It’s all cats in trees, these days.” Despite his best efforts, Nathan doesn’t quite manage to keep the annoyance out of his tone.

Duke drops into one of the chairs at the kitchen table and raises an eyebrow at him. “That’s what we wanted, right?”

Huffing an almost guilty sigh, Nathan turns away to look out the window. “It is. You’re right. It is. I don’t know. I just thought I’d get it—”

“With her?” Duke finishes.

When Nathan turns to look at him, he finds Duke turned away.

It’s uncharacteristically democratic, the gentleness to Nathan’s tone when he asks, “You must have thought the same thing, right?”

Duke has no idea what expression crosses his face or how it must look to Nathan, only that he’s too worn out to paint on the smile, anymore.

“It was always gonna be you, Nate,” he murmurs. He laughs softly, but there’s no real humor in it. “Hell, I wouldn’t pick me, either.”

Discomfort becomes a palpable thing: something heavy in the air between them. Nathan fumbles for something to say while it swells like a lead balloon, pushing them down against the linoleum.

Duke rescues him from his floundering with a gentle, “It’s okay, buddy. Doesn’t matter anymore.”

Nathan struggles to look him in the eye for the rest of the day. It feels like a step forward and a step backward, all at once.

* * *

Duke used to spend a lot of time thinking about Jean—about what she was like, who she would grow up to be. But in spite of that, she never felt quite _real_. Even on the flight to Nebraska, even after talking with Eliza and Richard, she feels more like an _idea _than a _child_.

And then they land, and everything shifts. He finds himself frozen in a stranger’s driveway, feet made of lead, unable to bring himself to cross the twenty feet to the door.

The house is modest, cozy—with a green yard and a rose bush right beneath the windows. His daughter is inside—his _daughter_—and he’s rooted to the spot.

Nathan gets about halfway to the door before he realizes Duke isn’t behind him. He turns, a worried expression creasing his brows. “Hey,” he asks, taking an unusually soft tone that Duke isn’t used to having directed at him. “You alright?”

Duke turns a wide-eyed gaze on him; he can feel his heartbeat in his mouth. “What if—” he stammers, “I don’t know. What is she’s—better off without me?”

Nathan makes a face uncomfortably close to pity, and if Duke’s focus wasn’t elsewhere, he’d call him out on it. As it is, he has more important things to worry about than what Nathan thinks about him. (For once.)

Nathan seems to be choosing his words carefully when he asks, “Why would you think that?”

Letting out a frustrated noise, Duke doesn’t pace so much as drift back towards the car only to stop himself again. “You know my dad. My family. I mean, what do I know about taking care of a kid?”

There’s something unbearably kind about the way Nathan crosses the distance between them to put a hand on his shoulder. Duke almost can’t stand it. “C’mon, Duke. You’re not like Simon.”

Duke doesn’t pull away, but it’s a near thing. He nods at the guard tattoo peeking out from Nathan’s sleeve. “That’s not what you thought when you got that,” he mutters.

Nathan, to his credit, has the good sense to look ashamed. He looks away and tugs his sleeve down, hiding it. “I wasn’t thinking straight,” he mumbles.

They’re quiet for a few moments. Duke can’t tear his eyes away from the front door—the house Jean spent the first three years of her life in. Where she grew up with no idea of the troubles, of Haven. Of him.

“I don’t wanna fuck this up,” he confesses, voice so small he hardly recognizes it.

“You won’t,” Nathan says. There’s so much certainty to his voice, it’s almost contagious. Almost.

Duke lets out a shaky breath and nods, even if he feels mechanical and stiff as he forces his way to the front door. “God, I hope you’re right,” he sighs.

Knocking is one of the hardest things he’s ever done.

Eliza opens the door. She’s a small woman with a face even kinder than her voice. Her silver hair falls around her jaw in gentle curls, making her look soft and picturesque. The skin around her eyes and mouth is crinkled with laugh-lines and Duke feels a sudden rush of overwhelming gratefulness that this was the family that took his daughter in.

His daughter. The thought still doesn’t feel right. Doesn’t feel true. Doesn’t feel real.

“You must be Duke,” she says, reaching out to squeeze his hand. “Richie and I were so glad you called. It’s a real crime what that town does to people.”

Duke manages a clumsy smile, squeezing her hand in return. “It’s a… special place.”

“Special’s one word for it. Come in, come in.”

Distantly, Duke is aware of Nathan introducing himself to Eliza, but once he crosses the threshold this buzz of anxiety fills his head until there’s barely room for anything else. The house is cozy and bright, with toys littered around the living room. He’s slapped with a pang of guilt, realizing he should have brought some kind of gift and then another when it dawns on him that he’d have no idea what to get—no idea what she likes.

He comes back to himself as he realizes that Eliza’s talking to him.

“We told her there would be company, but we didn’t tell her who you are.” Something apologetic colors her tone and she reaches out to lay a small hand gently on his shoulder. “We thought—well, we thought that decision should be up to you. She’s very bright, and we’ve always been honest with her about being adopted. We never wanted her to feel ashamed of it.” She squeezes his shoulder before letting him go. “I know that town and those—_troubles _make this complicated for you. Richie and I didn’t wanna make any assumptions.”

“Thank you,” Duke murmurs, his voice thick. He doesn’t know if it’s better or worse, the fact that she doesn’t know. It should take some of the pressure off, but it doesn’t. She’s still his. He could still fuck this up beyond repair. He doesn’t know _how _exactly, but the threat of it sits on his shoulders like he’s some makeshift Atlas.

The stakes have never felt higher (and he helped save the world, once.)

“Are you ready?” Eliza asks, her expression bright.

Duke nods, even though he feels anything but.

“Jeanie! Come say hello to our guests!” Eliza calls. Distantly, muffled though the wall, they hear her hollered, “Coming!” and the shuffle of things being set aside and moved out of the way.

When Jean rounds the corner, it’s immediately obvious how Eliza was able to tell which of them was Duke at just a glance.

“She looks just like you,” Nathan murmurs, awe coloring his voice.

It’s true. She’s the spitting image of him—dark haired and tall for her age, with a long nose and dark, curious eyes.

“She’s beautiful,” Nathan adds, and Duke manages a strangled little laugh.

“I thought you said she looked like me.”

There isn’t time for Nathan to counter, though, because Jean’s run right up to them—within earshot, now—head tipped back to stare up at them.

“Hi,” she announces without an ounce of shyness. “My name’s Jean. I’m three and three quarters.”

Duke kneels down and tries not to get too overwhelmed when he’s looking at her eye-to-eye. It occurs to him, seeing her like this, just how long three years really is. How much he’s _missed_. For a moment, he’s afraid he’ll fall apart right then and there.

He manages to hold himself together, though. He’s smiling from ear to ear when he says, “Hey, Jean. I’m Duke. I’m a—friend of your mom’s.”

“She’s not my mom,” Jean corrects immediately.

Duke’s face drops in shock and he casts a helpless look up at Eliza, wordlessly asking for some kind of help, but Eliza just smiles that warm smile of hers and nods back to Jean—letting her speak for herself.

“Right, sorry,” Duke says, trying to smooth over the fumble. “Your—?”

“Nana.”

“Nana.” He nods. “I’m a friend of your nana’s.”

“Okay,” Jean chirps, polite and cheerful, but clearly not too interested in the politics of adults. She’s quick to pivot into something else, asking, “Do you wanna see my bug collection?”

“Bug collection,” Duke repeats, eyebrows raised. He glances at Eliza and she grins back at him.

“She’s very proud of it,” Eliza says fondly.

Duke finds himself in tow behind her as Jean captures a couple of his fingers in her tiny hand and drags him down the hall toward her room. He shoots a quick look back at Nathan and Eliza before they round the corner.

Jean’s bug collection turns out to be: one dead bee trapped in a small Tupperware (“because of the sting-ger”), a monarch butterfly with half a missing wing, a pillbug in a Styrofoam cup that probably used to be alive but doesn’t look all that lively, a curled up orb-weaver, a ladybug permanently stuck in a state of half-opened wings, and a beetle that she doggedly refers to as a “juned” bug.

Duke dutifully listens to her explain what she’s learned about each insect, grinning broadly when she stumbles over words bigger than she is. It aches, just a little: how wonderful she is. How much he loves her, already.

“Can I get you anything?” Eliza asks Nathan as she gestures for him to take a seat.

He settles on the plush couch. “No, thank you, I’m fine.”

Through the wall, he can hear Jean explaining that even though spiders _look _scary, they’re actually very important to the “e-co-system.” He ducks his head to hide a smile. Figures that Duke’s kid would be brilliant _and _a chatterbox. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised.

Eliza settles in the chair across from him. She’s older than he’d expected her to be. She seems to notice him studying her, because she flashes a warm smile and says, “Richie and I have been doing this a long time. Our oldest has a family of his own, now.” She smooths a blanket over her lap.

“We weren’t planning on fostering anymore, but—well. When Audrey told us about Jean’s situation, we knew this was where she needed to be.” She laughs quietly. “We do our best, here, but it’s hard to keep up, sometimes. My knees aren’t what they used to be.”

Nathan flashes a smile. “Thank you, for taking her. She was—uh, a little bit of a surprise. There was no way we could have taken care of her.”

When he says “we,” he means it more generally—any of them: Duke, Audrey, him, even Beatie. Eliza must misunderstand, however, because she folds her hands in her lap, a fond look on her face when she asks, “How long have you two known each other?”

Nathan isn’t expecting the sudden left turn in the conversation. “Me and Duke? We grew up together. Since we were—six, I think?”

Pressing a hand to her heart, she coos, “Oh, that’s so sweet. Very romantic.”

“Oh.” Nathan’s slapped with something like emotional vertigo. The room pitches and he struggles to catch up. _“Oh,_ no. No,” he stammers. Embarrassment creeps up hot and sharp—focused, like sucking on a lemon. “No, we’re not—uh. We’re just friends.”

“You don’t need to be shy,” she scoffs with a knowing smile. “If you’re going to be a part of Jean’s life, then we want you both to feel comfortable here.”

If it were possible for Nathan to sink into the couch cushions and disappear, he’d be long gone by now. “Really,” he chokes, struggling to meet her eyes, “Just friends. Promise.”

She raises her eyebrows at him, watching the absolute spectacle of his discomfort. “Of course,” she says, although the saccharine of her voice makes him wonder if she really believes it, “I’m sorry for assuming.”

“It’s fine,” he rushes to say. Better not to linger on the fact that they’re living together these days or that Duke made them breakfast before their flight or that Nathan’s reason for wanting to come along, at all, had a lot less to do with Jean and a lot more to do with not wanting to be in that apartment (their apartment) without him.

You get used to it, is the thing—having someone around. Another person filling the quiet.

If Eliza notices the conflicted look on his face, she graciously chooses not to mention it.

By the time Richard comes home, Duke has Jean perched on his hip, carting her around as she points him towards all the things she wants to show him. He’s wearing a serene sort of smile that Nathan hasn’t seen on him in—years, honestly.

“Going well, I take it,” Richard comments to Eliza as he kisses her cheek. He’s a large man with a full salt-and-pepper beard and bags under his eyes. He moves with the kind of gentle self-awareness of someone who understands their size and has made a conscious effort not to allow it to make him intimidating. Nathan isn’t sure there are many grown men he’d categorize as making him feel “safe” immediately after meeting them, but Richard Olsen is certainly one of them.

“They’ve been like this all night,” Eliza reports, happily. “Richie, this is Nathan. He’s a friend of Duke’s.”

Richard offers a firm handshake and a tired smile. “Pleased to meet you, Nate. You come all the way from Haven, too?”

“Yessir,” Nathan confirms with a nod.

“Huh. Good friend,” Richard comments offhandedly before stepping away to take off his coat and Nathan tries not to melt into the floor with the new wave of embarrassment that crashes against him. Eliza casts him a knowing smile, which doesn’t help the situation at all.

“Jeanie, honey,” Eliza calls, gravitating toward the kitchen where Jean is showing Duke her favorite Disney plates, “It’s almost bedtime. Why don’t you pick out a book for your new friend to read to you?”

Jean hops out of Duke’s arms. “Okay,” she chirps, hurrying in the direction of her room.

“Teeth and pajamas first!” Eliza reminds her, which Jean counters with another shouted _okay_.

Richard takes the opportunity to shake Duke’s hand and introduce himself.

“Well, that’s some family resemblance!” Richard laughs, and Duke ducks his head, running a hand anxiously through his hair with a soft chuckle of agreement.

“Those Crocker genes, I guess,” he mumbles, visibly uncomfortable.

“You doing okay?” Nathan asks quietly. He nudges Duke with his elbow.

“Yeah,” Duke says, but he flashes one of those smiles that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Nathan’s known him long enough to recognize it for what it is. “She’s great. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Nathan won’t press him in front of Richard and Eliza, but he can’t stop the frown that creases his brow. “Okay. Just checking.”

“I’m ready!” Jean calls from the other room.

As Duke disappears down the hall, Eliza leans toward Nathan and teases, “She must get that from her mother.”

Nathan doesn’t quite catch the joke, turning to her in confusion. “What do you mean?”

Eliza waves it off with a smile. “Oh, nothing. She’s just a little motormouth and your friend seems—shy.”

Nathan snorts. “He’s _not _shy,” he counters, without thinking. She’s not wrong, though. Duke’s been awfully reserved since they got here—at least compared to his usual. He sighs, crossing his arms. “I think he’s—nervous, you know?”

“I don’t know what he has to be nervous about,” Richard says, casually. “She’s obviously smitten with him.”

Nathan can’t help his smile.

Duke expected to be handed a picture book, but Jean passes a thick hardback into his hands when he settles in the chair beside her bed. He runs his hand over the cover, raising an eyebrow at the illustration across the front.

“Mermaids, huh?” He asks, voice bright and conspiratorial, “You know, I used to be a pirate.”

Jean’s face drops in exaggerated shock. She smacks the mattress in protest. “Pirates are the bad guys!”

Duke dissolves into startled laughter just as a voice from the doorway chimes in with a warm, “Nah, you just haven’t been talking to the right pirates.” Nathan winks at her from the threshold, leaning against the frame. “Pirates are the fun ones.”

Looking up in surprise, Duke regards him with a curious expression. He doesn’t mean to stare, but he doesn’t know what to say. Nathan crosses his arms, a little uncomfortable, but he’s still smiling when he teases, “What? I wanna hear the bedtime story.”

Duke huffs a laugh and rolls his eyes. “Fine, but if you make fun of me, you’re _walking _back to the hotel.”

Nathan holds up his hands in mock surrender. “I promise, I promise.”

Duke gets about a chapter deep before Jean dozes off. She fights the good fight, stubbornly forcing her eyes open as long as she can. He reads just a little bit longer to make sure she’s really asleep before quietly closing the book and setting it on her nightstand.

Both Duke and Nathan hover in the doorway a moment, watching her.

“She’s really great, Duke,” Nathan murmurs, a little awkwardly, to fill the quiet.

“She’s perfect,” Duke murmurs, watching for just a moment longer before he flicks off the light and closes the door.

The four adults settle at the kitchen table. Richard sets mugs of coffee in front of the both of them, but Duke doesn’t touch his. He looks far away. Nathan doesn’t know how to reach him.

“I figure,” Richard says, “we ought to talk about her future and how you wanna be involved in it.”

Duke nods, staring out the window. Trying to bring himself to speak feels like swimming up from the bottom of a deep, deep pool. No matter how far he goes, he never seems to reach the surface.

“I don’t know how much you know about the troubles,” Duke croaks finally, his throat dry.

“Just old stories,” Eliza says. “I know strange things happen in that town. Haven. Stranger than other places.”

“They aren’t just stories.” Duke runs a hand through his hair, huffing out a long breath and refocusing on the tabletop instead of the window. “The troubles don’t happen all the time. It’s a… a cycle. Every twenty-seven years, they come back. And things get weirder and weirder until—”

Until Audrey goes into the barn.

He sighs. “Until they’re gone again. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. There’s not really a manual.”

“Audrey said you couldn’t be around Jean because of the troubles,” Eliza prompts, searching his expression.

Duke feels like the pressure in the room is climbing, like he’s being flattened into his chair, like he can’t pull air into his lungs. “Jean has a trouble. Or—I don’t know. Maybe it’s her mom’s. But—when the troubles are active, she makes me… really, really sick.”

His voice wavers. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Nathan watching him. “I wanna be in her life,” he pushes, even when his voice goes thin and strained, “but I don’t know if I can be, forever.”

Nathan’s hand settles gently in the center of his back. It’s the closest thing he has to an anchor. Duke leans into it, just a little, to keep himself from falling to pieces in front of Richard and Eliza. If he focuses on that point of contact, he can keep his breathing steady.

He manages a laugh. He’s always hiding behind laughter. But this one sounds weak and shattered even to his own ears. “You raised one hell of kid,” he chokes, his smile cracking on his face like chipped paint, “I don’t wanna break her heart if I have to disappear, you know?”

“It’s your choice,” Eliza says, kind and quiet. She smiles sympathetically at him. “But I think she’d be lucky to have you in her life.”

“Stay in contact at least, yeah?” Richard asks.

“Yeah. Yes. Absolutely,” Duke rushes to agree. “Please. I want—pictures and updates and—anything.”

“Of course.” Eliza reaches out to squeeze his hand. “You’re family, now.”

It does something to Duke, that word. Shakes him all the way down to his foundations. Unearths him completely. He stares at her with wide, shocked eyes.

“I—thank you.”

* * *

Duke keeps it together through another hour of casual conversation. He even holds it together when he leans over the rail of Jean’s tiny bed to kiss her sleeping forehead and whisper a soft goodbye. (It’s a close thing, though. It occurs to him, standing there, that it could be the very last time he ever sees her, and the thought nearly cleaves him in half.) He keeps it together as they say their goodbyes to Eliza and Richard and on the short walk down the driveway to the rental car.

But when he sits down in the driver’s seat, everything hits him all at once. He stares at the steering wheel, unable to make his hand complete the simple task of turning the keys in the ignition. He’s all cut puppet strings. He feels a thousand miles away from his body, a thousand miles away from this place.

“Duke?” Nathan asks, but Duke doesn’t trust himself to speak. His throat is too tight, his breath too shallow. He’s so close to the edge that all it would take is a whisper to blow him over.

She’s beautiful. She’s so beautiful and real and _his _and he doesn’t know what to do with that. He’s never felt so hollow and so full all at once. He loved her from the moment she looked at him, from the moment he walked through the door, from the moment Audrey showed him her photo, three and a half years ago. He loves her and it’s going to ruin him.

Panic claws through his body. Distantly, he’s aware of Nathan’s eyes on him, but it feels like an eternity before he feels stable enough to speak.

“Which is worse, Nate?” He whispers—eyes fixed straight ahead, shoulders tense. “Thinking your old man never wanted to be in your life at all, or—? Or him being there for twenty-seven years and then dropping off the fucking map?” He shakes his head, squeezing his eyes closed and curling down around the steering wheel when he all but pleads, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

Nathan does his best to keep his tone hopeful when he says, “I mean, it’s another two decades from now, right? You’ve got time. Maybe you can—I don’t know. Explain it to her. Prepare her for it.”

“No,” Duke insists before Nathan even has a chance to finish. Duke turns to look at him, something desperate behind his eyes. Nathan’s never seen him like this. He doesn’t know how to help. “No. No way. Then she—what? Knows that she could—No. How am I supposed to put that on her?”

Nathan’s awfully kind and careful when he squeezes Duke's shoulder. It’s unbearable—it’s pathetic—how much that simple touch means to Duke, in that moment. It’s like he’s been falling since the moment he walked out of Jean’s room and this, for the first time, feels like something real and solid.

"And what about _you_?” Nathan asks. “It's gonna kill you to stay away from her."

Duke collapses against the back of the seat, his voice flat and defeated when he sighs, "It's gonna kill me not to."

Tipping his head back, he squeezes his eyes shut and tries to breathe. Everything feels too big. Too important. Too easy for him to fuck up.

They’re both quiet for a moment before Duke says, “The kindest thing I could do for that kid is to disappear now and never come back.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

When Duke turns to face Nathan, he’s shocked by the gentle openness of his expression. He’s sure, at first, that it must be a platitude—that Nathan’s just trying to ease his way out of an awkward situation. But Nathan’s looking at him with this cracked open honesty that cuts through him like a knife.

Duke’s throat feels dry when he croaks, “What do I have to offer her that she doesn’t already have?”

“You.” Nathan says simply. “She’d be lucky. To have you in her life. She’d be better for it.”

Glancing away with a strained smile, Duke tries to cut the tension with a fragile, “I, uh, think you’re in the minority on that one, big guy.”

“You got more friends than you think.”

Duke laughs a little wetly, rushing to wipe the tears out of his eyes before they can go and make a fool out of him. They sit in silence for a few moments before Duke digs up the courage to admit, “I’m fucking terrified, Nate.” He drops his forehead against the steering wheel.

Nathan takes his hand.

It’s a small, simple thing.

Neither of them speaks. Duke squeezes his fingers and they sit together in the quiet tragedy of it. It helps—not having to carry it alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Undying love to my darling, [crownedcarl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownedcarl/pseuds/crownedcarl) for letting me scream at her about this fic, supporting me, and helping to build the AU it's set in.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Despite all evidence to the contrary, this is still VERY much a Duke/Nathan fic. We’re taking the scenic route baybee.  
Swapped the rating to mature due to some (admittedly pretty mild) sexual content at the end of the chapter, but will probably be upping that to explicit in future chapters.

They hold hands in silence for a quarter of an hour.

No matter how many times Duke tells himself that being in Jean’s life is the better option, he can’t silence the voice of doubt—the one that says he’ll have to abandon her, someday. The one that says they still don’t know how the troubles _really_ work, still don’t know if the twenty-seven-year cycle is the only way it could happen.

They could come back in ten years, that voice tells him, in five, in two. They could come back and never go away again. Duke and Nathan had tried to stop Audrey from going into that barn. Maybe the next saps to fall in love with her really do. Maybe she never goes in, the barn disappears, the troubles never go away.

And Duke never sees Jean again.

There are too many what-ifs. He could fill the whole ocean with them.

Finally, Duke musters up the wherewithal to start the car and drive to the hotel. Nathan doesn’t touch him again for the rest of the ride home. Doesn’t talk, either.

Nathan has been, strangely, _less_ tactile with Duke ever since the barn. Even though now he _can_ feel, and back then he couldn’t. Before Audrey disappeared, Nathan found dozens of small excuses to reach out to him—to catch his attention, to steady him, to clap a hand on his back. These days, he shies away from even the smallest connection. Hell, it took weeks for him to stop flinching when they brushed accidentally.

Duke used to chalk it up to the _newness_ of feeling, for Nathan.

But it’s been months, now. It isn’t _new_, anymore. And Nathan still barely comes near him.

There’s probably a laundry list of good reasons for that. Nathan must have been dying for any kind of connection, during the troubles. Maybe it was grounding—being able to see himself interacting with the world, knowing that the world felt _him _even when he didn’t feel it back.

But Duke keeps coming back to the nauseating possibility that Nathan doesn’t touch him anymore because he doesn’t _like _it. Because he doesn’t _want _to anymore.

In some ways, losing Audrey made loving Nathan that much harder.

The uncomfortable specter of grief always gets in the way. No matter what they do, they remind each other of her. Duke loved them both, simultaneously, once upon a time. But for some reason, loving Nathan _without _Audrey feels too much like moving on. Like a betrayal of her memory.

In other ways, losing Audrey makes loving Nathan so, so easy. Too easy. Because Nathan understands what it is to lose her. Because sorrow cracked Nathan open like a seed starting to sprout. Because Nathan is still here, with him, in spite of all the reasons he shouldn’t be.

As if Duke didn’t have enough heartache to worry about, between Jean and Audrey. Nathan had to go and _hold_ _his_ _hand _and now he’s back to spiraling over _him_, too.

It’s humiliatingly childish, letting himself get torn into pieces over a gesture as simple as that. He’s sick of reading into the intentions behind every little look—the _he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not_ theatrics of it all. It’s exhausting and it’s embarrassing, but, in spite of all that, it’s still a welcome distraction from the agony of his dilemma over Jean.

Wanting Nathan hurts, but it’s a different kind of hurt. It’s an _old _hurt. He knows how to breathe around it.

They check into their hotel room and Duke changes into sweatpants and lets his hair down before collapsing into the bed by the window. They’ve barely been in Nebraska for six hours, but it feels like it’s been a week.

“Are you doing okay?” Nathan asks, voice quiet, from the other side of the room. Duke lolls his head to level him with a look and Nathan glances away. “Right. Stupid question.”

The problem—as if there’s just one—with sitting alone in a hotel room next to someone he’s trying desperately not to love is that it just reminds him of Colorado. Of Audrey.

He drops his head back against the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. Audrey. Now there’s a hurt he doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to. He wishes she were here. She was always good in a crisis.

“Audrey’d love her,” Duke murmurs, imagining the serious, grown-up way Audrey would talk to Jean if she were here to meet her.

Of course, if Audrey were here, he wouldn’t be.

It’s awful, thinking of it like that.

“Audrey’d tell you not to run,” Nathan says, stubborn and a little shy about it. Like he’s trying to be gentle, but he doesn’t know how to be.

“I don’t know about that,” Duke sighs. He picks absently at the hem of his shirt. “Audrey did her fair share of running.”

“From what?” Nathan asks, skeptical.

“Me.”

The word hangs in the air, huge and uncomfortable.

Duke doesn’t look at Nathan. He doesn’t want to see whatever guilty, pitiful expression he’s got on his face.

After a silence that goes on for a small eternity, Nathan manages a stiff and stilted, “She loved you.”

Duke rolls onto his side to look at Nathan perched on the edge of the other bed. He casts him a sympathetic look, crooking a humorless half-smile. “You don’t know that,” he murmurs with a quiet, practiced sort of patience. “But thanks,” he adds on a tired sigh. “It’s nice of you. But, uh. If she did, she had a funny way of showing it.”

Duke crossed a lot of lines, for her. Even now, there are nights where he wakes in a cold sweat. The dreams are always different and somehow always the same. Sometimes, he stares down at Harry Nix just like he did when it happened. Sometimes, he’s a third-party observer, watching himself smother Harry to death. Sometimes, he talks. Sometimes, Harry talks. Sometimes, Harry begs. Sometimes, Harry sits on his chest and strangles him. In the worst ones, all Duke does is sit next to him—peaceful and quiet and without any death—and then wakes up in tears.

It aches, carrying a love like Audrey’s hand-in-hand with a guilt like that. But Duke’s used to love having teeth.

Nathan’s watching him with this kicked-puppy, tail-between-his-legs, tormented expression that’s both too _much_ and too _late_.

“I’m sorry—” Nathan starts, but Duke interrupts him with an exasperated noise and a shake of his head.

“Don’t do that,” Duke sighs. “I don’t want an apology.” Sitting up, he runs a hand through his hair. It’s gotten long. Longer than Audrey has ever, or will ever, see it. Just another reminder that the world didn’t stop when she did, even if it felt like it.

“What _do_ you want, Duke?” Nathan’s sudden shift into thorny irritation is so familiar at this point in their relationship that it rolls off Duke’s back like water.

_You_ is the answer to Nathan’s question. It’s the answer he’s not nearly stupid enough or drunk enough to give, but it’s the truth.

“I dunno. About a hundred-year nap?”

“Well, unfortunately our plane leaves in the morning.” It’s a joke. Sarcastic and biting as it is, it’s a real and honest _joke_ from Nathan goddamn Wuornos and Duke almost applauds him for it. “Think you can survive on a six-hour nap, instead?”

Barking a startled laugh, Duke concedes, “I mean, if I _have_ to.”

“You have to,” Nathan counters, a real smile sneaking onto his face. He gets up to change out of his jeans and Duke stares at the ceiling.

“You know,” Nathan says as he climbs into bed, flicking off the light on his side of the dresser. “I could have taken more time off. Given you a few more days with her.”

Crawling under the covers of his own bed, Duke gives a dismissive, “Nah. It’s tourist season. Kitchen manager would strangle me.”

Nathan doesn’t say a word—not calling him on the lie but not buying into it either. After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Duke sighs. Quietly, he confesses, “I—needed an out. If it went bad. At least at the Gull I don’t pay for drinks, you know?”

If Nathan’s at all concerned about just how often Duke’s been taking advantage of that little perk—well, he doesn’t mention it.

Duke switches off the lamp and, with the black-out curtain on the window, the only light in the room comes from the dim glow of the bathroom fluorescents filtering underneath the door. If he squints, he can make out the vague shape of Nathan in the dark.

“But you’re coming back, right?” Nathan asks. Something about the dark drops Nathan’s volume to a whisper. Duke wonders if it counts as pillow-talk when they’re six feet apart, on separate beds. When they haven’t so much as kissed since they were teenagers.

“Don’t know yet,” Duke murmurs. Quiet settles between them and after a few moments, he thinks Nathan must have fallen asleep.

Duke’s already resigned himself to laying awake all night. He’s tired in a way sleep won’t cure. For a while, the only sound in the room is the restless rustle of the sheets as Duke tosses and turns. All the months he’s spent curled up on a _couch_, and for some reason a cushy hotel bed is harder to get comfortable on.

The devil you know, and all that.

“You’d make a really good dad,” Nathan says, unprompted, into the darkness.

It catches Duke so utterly off-guard, he nearly forgets to answer. He stares at Nathan’s silhouette, just barely able to make out the dim outline of his features in the darkness. It’s hard to tell, but he thinks Nathan might be looking at him, too.

“Thanks,” he whispers, pulling the blanket tighter around himself.

There was a time when a very deluded, very lonely teenaged version of himself thought maybe he could have that kind of future, with Nathan. A family. The picket fence kind of life. It’s the last time he can remember wanting that for himself.

Things blew up with Nathan in a big way and it was the last straw in a long line of broken backs. He left Haven convinced that happy endings were just lies adults told each other to make up for the shitshow that life really was. That heartbroken kid never could have imagined a world with Jean in it.

He would, however, be absolutely furious at himself for still chasing after Nathan fucking Wuornos.

* * *

It’s seven months after Audrey’s “death” that Duke finally comes to terms with the fact that Nathan isn’t going to want him back.

Duke finally ponied up the cash for a new mattress and moved from Nathan’s couch into his unused office. They’re really and truly living together, now. They have a routine. Duke’s always up first, which means Duke makes the coffee. Sometimes breakfast, although Nathan’s rarely willing to eat first thing in the morning. Duke can always persuade him with pancakes, but—unlike Nathan—Duke can’t stomach pancakes every day of the week, so it’s usually just coffee.

Duke’s schedule at work isn’t nearly as consistent as Nathan’s, but he makes sure there’s always food in the house. Nathan doesn’t always eat if someone isn’t around to watch. Duke pays attention to the food he likes. He keeps the fridge stocked with it, sends texts to remind Nathan “how” to reheat various leftovers as a substitute for more transparently telling him _to_ do it.

They even leave the house together, these days. Nathan—sometimes less than graciously—rolls out of bed at the crack of dawn to tag along with Duke to the Saturday farmers market every week, all summer. Duke occasionally wraps up the Gull’s lunch special and brings it to the station. They take the Rouge down the coast.

They go to Nebraska.

Things are as amicable between them as they’ve ever been. For the first time since they were kids, Duke feels confident—comfortable—calling Nathan his friend.

But that’s all it is. And he can’t keep breaking his heart against it.

* * *

(A good three months after Duke “comes to terms with it” and he still hasn’t _done_ anything about it. That’s the problem with old habits.)

* * *

Duke only works graveyard shifts on weekends. The Gull practically runs itself, these days, and all he really needs to do is keep her stocked, make schedules, and put out payroll. But he misses having something to do with his hands, so he helps out in the kitchen on weekdays and bartends on weekends and passes all his tips on to the rest of the staff. (They’re good tips, too, because Duke is an equal opportunity flirt who’s good at telling people what they want to hear. Had to be, seeing as there was a time in his life when sweettalking his way into someone’s bed was the only way he’d get to sleep in one. These days, though, the stakes are a lot lower.)

It’s slow for a Sunday, with just the usual smattering of regulars lined up at the bar. Duke’s resigned himself to an easy, if uninteresting, shift when a man he’s never seen before walks through the door. He’s tall—broad in the shoulders but narrow in the waist. There’s no way he’s a local. He looks more big-city than small-town.

The man scans the shelves of bottles behind the bar while he waits for Duke to finish with another customer.

When he’s done ringing up Mason Clifford’s tab, Duke leans his hip against the bar in front of the newcomer and flashes a beatific grin. “See something you like?” He asks, his voice warm.

The man’s eyes snap to him. He isn’t remotely subtle when he runs his gaze down Duke’s body and then back up. “You could say that,” he counters with a smile of his own.

He’s beautiful: deep-set eyes and upturned mouth, jaw dark with stubble. He’s wearing a wine-red coat that looks tailored and expensive. He looks too high fashion for Haven. Too neat, too clean.

“You’ve got good taste,” Duke purrs, “But what are you drinking?”

“Gentleman Jack. A double.”

“_Oh_, I take it back, you have terrible taste.” He turns around and fishes a bottle off the shelf. “Why overpay for mediocre whiskey when you can have the good stuff?” Leaning his elbows on the bar, Duke pushes the bottle toward him. “Now this? THIS is good whiskey. It’s a rye not a bourbon, but,” he grins, “if you’re ordering Gentleman Jack, I’m gonna guess you’re not picky.”

The man lifts the bottle to read the label, laughing when he does. “_Whistlepig_?” He asks, incredulous even when he’s using every possible excuse to bat those eyelashes of his at Duke.

Duke shrugs, straightening up to grab a pair of tumblers. “Promise you won’t care what it’s called when it’s in your mouth.”

“Uh huh. That go for you, too?”

Duke manages to keep a pretty straight face, all things considered—his raised eyebrows are the only hint of any cracks in his composure. He bites down on an indulgent grin. “I’m Duke,” he offers as he pours them both a glass. “And you,” he hums, passing the other man his drink and lifting his own for a toast, “aren’t shy, huh?”

“My fatal flaw,” the man teases with a wink, tapping their glasses together. “I’m Adrian.”

“You vacationing out in the boonies, Adrian? ‘Cause I know everybody in this town and I’d definitely remember you.”

“Just took a job out in Bangor but the rent here’s cheaper, so. Here I am.”

“Here you are,” Duke echoes warmly, unable to look away. He’s swept up in it for just a moment before a shout from the other end of the bar breaks the spell.

Duke rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I know, Bill. You want another mojito because you hate me. Coming right up.” He downs the glass he poured himself in one go before turning a loose, daring smile on Adrian. “Hold that thought,” he says, “and let me know how you like the drink.”

It’s about twenty minutes before Duke is able to come back to Adrian for longer than it takes to take an order. The Gull’s always like this right at the tail end of the night—one final rush before everyone starts peeling off and heading home. He’s in for at least another half hour of this and then it’s downhill until last call.

For this one, particular moment no one is trying to flag him down, so he takes advantage of the quiet to settle in front of Adrian again.

“You’re in high demand, huh?” Adrian teases.

“What can I say?” Duke chimes, twirling the shaker just to show off, “I’m good with my hands.”

Propping his elbows on the bar, he leans into Adrian’s space. Adrian matches him, shifting closer until Duke can smell the spice and pine of his cologne.

“I bet you are,” Adrian purrs, entirely forward and transparent when he runs a hand up the inside of Duke’s arm.

When Duke flirts for work, there’s no teeth to it. It’s all smiles and flattery—a very convincing charade utterly without substance. Any phone numbers he collects get tossed at the end of the night. He isn’t _really_ flirting. He doesn’t _really _care. But when Adrian touches his arm, Duke damn near shivers.

It occurs to him, then, just how long its been since anyone touched him. Not since Audrey. Not since Colorado.

Fuck.

“Easy, cowboy,” Duke says, but doesn’t pull away. “I’m on the clock.”

Adrian flashes him a grin, running his thumb along Duke’s forearm. “And I’m an honest, paying customer,” he teases back.

Eyebrows raising, Duke feigns a scandalized tone when he asks, “Are you suggesting I can be bought?” He leans across the bar, voice dropping to something honey-smooth and hot when he teases, “‘Cause you’re right.”

Adrian tips forward like he can’t help himself, like he’s being dragged into Duke’s orbit. He’s barely a breath from Duke’s mouth when Duke pulls back.

He’d be lying if he said he didn’t like it: the unbalanced, unfiltered _want_ on Adrian’s face. He’d be lying if he said the chase wasn’t his favorite part.

He’s spent the last ten months—well, more like years, actually, depending on how you count it—begging for Nathan’s attention and now? He’s the center of Adrian’s. There’s something intoxicating about it. Being wanted. Being _seen_.

He revels in it. More than that, he revels in the absolute confidence that Adrian will double-down if he plays just a little hard to get.

Duke nods in the direction of Missy Denton, sat at the end of the bar. She’s an older, unfriendly looking woman nursing her third beer. “See her?” He asks and Adrian nods, a little confused. “If I’m late taking her order, she’ll burn this place down with us inside it. And the guy next to her? Tips me more than your entire tab.” There’s laughter dancing bright in his eyes when he purrs, “You want me all to yourself, you’re gonna have to wait ‘till my shift’s over. I mean, unless you got somewhere to be.”

It’s a dare.

“Oh, I’m very patient,” Adrian promises with a pleased little smile. Duke’s heart skips a beat.

He barely has the front door locked before Adrian’s pinning him against it.

“Your shift over yet?” He asks against Duke’s jaw, and it takes every ounce of self-control he has not to moan.

Tipping his head back, he laughs a breathy, “What, you’re not gonna sit and play nice while I put chairs on tables?”

“Uh-uh,” Adrian laughs, nipping playfully at Duke’s exposed throat. Duke does moan, this time. It’s a loud, shameless thing.

It’s been ages since he’s done this.

One hand on the back of Adrian’s head and the other twisted in the front of his shirt, Duke drags him into a kiss that’s filthy and shameless. It’s _good_ to feel wanted. To be touched. Adrian’s hands are big and warm on his waist and he lets himself be tugged closer, opens up the kiss like an offering.

“Okay,” Adrian pants, only pulling far enough back to tip their foreheads together while he catches his breath. “So, you look like _that_ and you kiss like _that_. How, exactly, are you single?” He pulls back a little more, casting an impish grin up at Duke. “Or _are_ you single?” He teases. “Am I _the_ _other woman_?” He noses closer, biting Duke’s lip. “’Cause I can work with that.”

Duke laughs—a bright, genuine, uncomplicated sound. “Maybe I just don’t like being tied down,” he teases back.

“Now that is a shame,” Adrian purrs, his eyes dark and focused on Duke’s mouth. “’Cause I bet you’d look very, very good tied down.”

Locking up takes a lot longer than usual. Adrian’s handsy and eager and distracting. Especially when he pushes Duke up onto one of the table, stands between his knees and kisses him like he’s starving for it. Adrian’s hands sneak under his shirt and it takes a degree of self-control Duke didn’t even know he was capable of to untangle himself.

“Opening shift’s gonna have my head on a stick if I leave the place looking like this,” he groans against Adrian’s mouth.

“Okay,” Adrian teases, voice bright, “so let go of me.” He runs his hands up Duke’s thighs where he’s wrapped his legs around Adrian’s hips.

“In a minute,” Duke murmurs before dragging him down to kiss him again.

They make it as far as the parking lot. They almost don’t make it any _farther_ than the parking lot.

Duke certainly isn’t too _proud_ to hookup in the backseat of his car, but he might be too _old_ for it. At least, his knees seem to think so.

He’s definitely not above undoing the zip of Adrian’s pants just for the thrill of how he moans into Duke’s mouth. And if he spends the next few minutes lazily jacking Adrian off while teasing him about how they really, really should start the car and leave? Who would blame him when the guy looks like _that_?

For the first time in months, he wakes up on the Rouge.

For a dizzying moment, he can’t remember where he is. It’s the same bed and the same boat he’s woken up in a thousand times before and he realizes, with a disorienting turn of his stomach, that it doesn’t feel like home. It hasn’t in a long time.

Hearing him stir, Adrian rolls over towards him—sleep ruffled and scowling at the sun streaming through the window. Duke’s heart crawls into his mouth.

He wonders if Adrian really looked this much like Nathan all along, or if it’s just a trick of the light.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to give the hugest thank you to my hero and dear friend [CrownedCarl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownedcarl/pseuds/crownedcarl) who is literally the only reason this chapter exists. 
> 
> I know this chapter took me a little longer than usual, but I think it's been worth it! We're finally about to hit the last act! Let me know what you think!
> 
> Mild content warning for this chapter: one of the characters very much tries to use sex as an unhealthy coping mechanism. Everything that happens is entirely consensual, but the motives behind it are certainly... rough.

It’s nice—feeling wanted.

It was never supposed to last. But Adrian looks at Duke the way he’s spent the last twenty years trying to get Nathan to look at him, the way Audrey looked at him, the way even Evi looked at him, once upon a time—before things went to hell in a handbasket.

It’s so easy to get caught up in it.

And it’s fine. Not lightning bolts, not fireworks, but fine. Good, even. Considering Duke’s habit of going ass-over-teakettle for emotionally unavailable opportunists, “good” is honestly better than expected. “Good” is a goddamn miracle.

And he’s allowed to want something comfortable for once in his life, isn’t he? Even if bumping into a sleep-ruffled Nathan in the hallway in the middle of the night still sends his heart skittering. Even if he doesn’t feel any more “over” Audrey than the day they lost her.

(They talked about her, once—him and Adrian. They got to talking about exes. Duke joked that it was awfully depressing pillow-talk for this early in the relationship. Adrian laughed and it was a beautiful sound.

“We lost her,” Duke had said. He’s sure Adrian drew his own conclusions from that wording. _We_. Whatever assumptions he made—well, they probably weren’t all that far from the truth. He and Nathan existed as a unit in those days—weeks, months—afterwards. It would be impossible to pry their grief, their loss, apart. Never mind what their relationship was or wasn’t. Never mind what Duke _wished_ their relationship was. _They_ lost her, regardless.)

Duke spends less time around Nathan, after Adrian comes into his life. It’s a change which feels strange but shockingly functional. Healthy, even. Still, he catches himself bailing on date nights early, sometimes. Not often, just—enough. Nights where he convinces himself he’s just tired and needs some alone time only to come home, make dinner, and spend hours watching TV with Nathan.

It’s not a red flag. It isn’t. But it might be a pink one.

Duke tries not to think about it.

* * *

Duke’s been trying to figure out how to broach this subject with Nathan for weeks now. The fact that he finally gets up the guts to do it first thing in the morning _could_ be considered an accident, but—if he’s being honest with himself—Duke maybe, just a little bit on purpose tries to have any and all hard talks with Nathan early in the morning. It might technically count as stacking the deck in his favor—Duke, after all, is perfectly functional in the mornings and Nathan definitely isn’t—but he figures he needs all the help he can get. They get along well, these days—better than they ever have, honestly—but arguing with Nathan still feels like navigating a minefield.

They sit at the kitchen table in their usual quiet, Nathan nursing his coffee and looking absolutely unhappy to be awake. Duke hates how endearing it is.

“I’m gonna go to Nebraska, this weekend,” Duke drawls, aiming for casual but maybe overstepping a little too far and dropping into strangely despondent. While he waits for a response, he picks at a chip along the rim of his coffee mug, absently trying to see if he can pry up the glaze around the missing piece.

“Oh,” Nathan says, voice hazy with sleep. He stretches and makes a face, counting out the days in his head. “I can probably get that off. Kinda last minute, but they can manage without me.”

Ah, yes. The hard part.

Duke stares at his mug, wondering why it feels so awful when he says, “I’m, uh—I’m gonna take Adrian with me.”

“Oh,” Nathan says—clipped and surprised.

Duke starts running his mouth before Nathan can follow that up with anything coherent. For all his forced calm, his practiced ease, the anxiety underneath it all feels utterly transparent. “I just figured it was probably time, you know? I mean—I don’t know. She’s my kid, and things are getting kind of serious and I guess that’s what you’re supposed to do? I’ve never exactly dated as a capital D ‘Dad’ before, but I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to—” He extends his hands in a helpless gesture. “You know. Introduce them to your kid.”

He leaves out the part he doesn’t know how to say—how going to Nebraska with Nathan has started to creep into the realm of something he feels guilty for. Or, at least, something he thinks he _should_ feel guilty for. He doesn’t know which one of those is worse.

A silence stretches between them, and Duke catches himself offering up a bashful, “Sorry,” that doesn’t help the situation at all. He doubts he could have made this more awkward if he actively tried.

Nathan’s quick to mumble, “It’s fine.” Although Duke wonders if that isn’t half to shut Duke up before he starts on another word-vomit rampage. After another bout of quiet, Nathan lets out a regretful little laugh. “You know, I’m gonna miss getting to see that little troublemaker.”

“I know,” Duke murmurs, nudging Nathan’s foot under the table. “She’s gonna miss you, too. And it’s not—I mean it’s not like you can _never_ come or anything, just—probably not _this_ time.”

“I get it,” Nathan says, his voice tight in a way Duke doesn’t think he’s imagining.

It hadn’t taken long for Jean to start calling Duke “Dad”. It probably helped that she thought of Eliza and Richard not as her parents but as something more like grandparents, so it was a role in her life that was still open to fill. The only issue was that, once Jean found out that Duke was her dad, she got into the habit of also calling Nathan “_papa_”. They tried correcting her to something less _loaded_, in the beginning. Despite a marked effort from all of the adults to get _Uncle Nathan_ to stick, Jean wasn’t interested. He was her papa and that was that. And, in the end, it seemed harmless enough. It was—sweet. Sweet that Jean had somebody else in her life that she got to feel safe with and close to.

Duke groans, dropping his head into his hands and dissolving into a helpless laugh.

“She’s _not_ gonna be happy you aren’t there.”

He doesn’t even have to look up to know Nathan’s smiling, now. A real smile—the kind Duke can hear in his voice.

“Nope,” Nathan agrees, entirely too pleased about it, “She definitely isn’t.”

* * *

Matthew Geller dies alone in his farmhouse on Tuesday night, but nobody finds him until Thursday. He is—was—a man in his late 80s who never retired and dealt with heart problems for the last two decades. The death is, without question, completely devoid of foul play.

But with the troubles gone, Nathan will take any and every excuse to do something other than chase after mild vandalism and noise complaints. If there’s even the smallest, most infinitesimal chance that Geller’s death might maybe, even possibly, even a little be from something other than heart failure, then it’s enough to get him out of the station and down to the morgue.

Dwight must have had the same idea, because he’s already there chatting with Gloria when Nathan arrives.

“Easy, Nathan, don’t hatch your chickens just yet,” Gloria drawls in lieu of a hello. She doesn’t look up from her clipboard, busy scribbling down the last of her notes. “It’s a cardiac arrest, no question.”

Dwight casts him a sympathetic glance. “Awful quiet these days, huh?”

Nathan doesn’t even try to keep the obvious irritation off his face. Gloria taps her pen and raises an eyebrow at him.

“Must be so hard for you to be so bored,” she scoffs, although there’s a hint of affection buried underneath it all. Deep, deep beneath. “Next time I’ll make sure to really kill somebody.”

“Please do,” Nathan groans, smiling in spite of himself. Sighing, he braces himself for the inevitable reality of returning to the station for another five hours of mindless paperwork. “Is it bad that I miss it?”

“Yes,” Dwight and Gloria say in unison, only to turn and look at each other in synchronized surprise.

“You should get a hobby, Nathan,” Gloria grumbles as she pushes the half-putrefied Matthew Geller back into his respective freezer.

“When’s the last time you and Duke took a trip to Nebraska?”

Dwight’s never actually met Jean, but Nathan’s pretty sure that—second to only Duke and Nathan themselves—he loves her more than anybody else in Haven. They’ve been meaning to find an excuse to drag him along to Nebraska with them. He just _lights up_ at the opportunity to talk with Duke about being a dad. It’s a bittersweet sort of thing, almost hard to look at, sometimes.

Nebraska, however, is something of a sore spot for Nathan, right now. “Couple months,” he sighs, too frustrated to be embarrassed by his own visible petulance. “But Duke’s taking his boyfriend this weekend, so I’m uninvited.”

“Oh, Nathan,” Gloria groans in that knowing, disappointed way of hers. She doesn’t say it, but it comes with a heavily implied: _you stupid asshole_.

Casting Nathan a puzzled look, Dwight asks, “Boyfriend? Aren’t you two living together?”

Nathan feels his face go hot. Why does he keep having this conversation? “Yeah, as _roommates_.”

Dwight cocks an eyebrow, studying him in a way Nathan doesn’t like. It’s like he _sees_ too much. “Huh,” he muses—innocent as anything—and Nathan wants to melt into the floor. “Guess I misread that one.”

Gloria rolls her eyes. “They’ve been bickering like an old married couple since they were ten years old. Who could blame you?”

This is what Nathan gets, really, for hoping there had been a murder. This is his karmic punishment. He stares down at the tiled floor and grits out, “I should get back to the station.”

Gloria leans in towards Dwight to very unsubtly murmur, “He’s mad ‘cause it’s true.”

“Real mad,” Dwight teases, eyes bright.

“Hilarious,” Nathan grumbles, feeling cornered and painfully embarrassed. “Very mature.”

Dwight shrugs, laughing lightly as he reaches for his coat. “No troubles to clean up after. Gotta get my jollies somehow.”

Gloria rolls her eyes, waving them both away. Despite herself, she can’t quite wipe the grin off her face. “Alright, both of you, scram. It’s hard enough to do my job without you two idiots breathing down my neck every time some poor asshole chokes on a chicken bone.”

“Alright, we’re going,” Dwight says, ushering Nathan out the door along with him. On their way down the hallway, he offers a friendly, “Let’s grab a drink, this weekend. Y’know, since you’re uninvited from the Nebraska trip.”

Still a little prickly from the teasing, Nathan does his best to unruffle his feathers when he admits, “Yeah, that—sounds nice, actually.”

Maybe this weekend won’t be so bad.

It occurs to him when he’s halfway back to the station that the only way Dwight couldn’t know about Adrian would be if Duke never mentioned him. Duke, who never shuts up about anything. Duke, who grabs a drink with Dwight every couple weeks or so.

He feels like he’s sixteen again—swept up in the whirlwind of vying for Duke Crocker’s attention.

Childish as it is, he can’t help but wonder if it means something.

* * *

Things are, quite frankly, going even worse than Duke expected them to.

As soon as Jean realizes that Nathan isn’t just lagging behind in the car, she musters up the coldest, sternest fury her little body can hold and stares Adrian down like she could bore holes in him just by looking. Adrian is taking the whole thing as well as anyone could expect, desperately trying to keep his sense of humor without wilting like a dying flower under her gaze.

“Where,” she asks, calm in a way that makes her awfully intimidating for someone who’s only three feet tall, “is Papa?”

Duke, in a rare show of humility, can feel his face go red. “Kids,” he jokes, trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug with a laugh and an exaggerated shrug. He kneels down in front of Jean, ruffling her short hair. She allows it, but not without a very dramatic wrinkling of her brow.

Yeah, she’s his kid alright.

“He had work this weekend, kiddo.” It _isn’t_ a lie, which is the only reason he doesn’t feel terrible saying it. Glancing up at Adrian over his shoulder, he urges, “But this is Adrian. He’s my—boyfriend.” The words come out crisp and methodical, like something read from a script. He winces at his own clumsiness. It’s all new to him—parenting, serious dating, introducing a kid to a partner (or maybe more accurately, in this case, a partner to a kid). He can’t help but feel like he’s doing it wrong.

Sullen and suspicious, Jean crosses her arms and levels a dark glare at Duke. Her voice pitches down to a conspiratorial (and purposefully loud) whisper when she asks, “Does Papa know?”

If it weren’t so utterly humiliating and potentially relationship sabotaging, it would be hilarious. He can’t help the sheepish smile that crosses his face. He reaches out to squeeze her little arm and gently laughs, “Jeanie. I know you like Nathan, but he’s just my friend. And he knows all about Adrian. And he says he misses you and he wishes he could have come.”

The last part seems to appease Jean—at least for now—and she uncrosses her arms, even if the look she casts at Adrian remains just to the left of hostile. She turns her attention back to Duke and insists, “Tell him he _has_ to come next time.”

Duke laughs. “I’ll tell him.” Pulling her into a hug, he adds, “There, that’s from him. He wanted me to give it to you.”

Jean brightens up immediately, seeming to remember something. Turning on her heel and racing down the hall, she yells, “Stay there! I wanna show you something!”

Once she’s out of earshot, Adrian lets out a held breath and whispers, “Great. She hates me. Your kid hates me.”

“Hate’s a strong word,” Duke mitigates. A teasing grin lights up his eyes. “_Deeply_ suspicious is more like it.”

Underneath the easy demeanor, Duke’s as much of an anxious mess as Adrian is. He keeps feel like he’s making mistakes, like he’s somehow managing to hurt all three of the most important people in his life at once. Like he was supposed to do _more_ to make that conversation less of a train wreck.

“What is it with Crockers and Nathan Wuornos?” Adrian jokes, a real—if nervous—smile crossing his face.

“Maybe it’s just comforting to be around somebody who’s an even bigger mess than we are,” Duke teases back. He reaches up to straighten Adrian’s collar, eyes warm when he says. “You’ve got this. She’s just me if I was extremely short and very excited about bugs.”

“I’m not short!” Jean calls from the other room. “You’re too tall!”

Considering how Duke nearly brains himself on the doorframe going into the hallway, she might actually have a point.

The day goes well. Not as well as it would have gone if Nathan were there, but Duke tries not to let himself linger on that. Adrian is _new_ and he’s _different_ and there’s nothing wrong with that. He and Jean will find their rhythm eventually. And for all of Jean’s vaguely antagonistic attempts at getting Adrian off-balance, Adrian actually seems to get _more_ comfortable the longer they stay.

“She’s just like you,” he comments fondly.

Duke rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling in spite of himself. “Name the last time I listed off bug trivia to you.”

“Does lobster trivia count?”

Duke, much to his utter surprise, finds himself almost entirely out maneuvered. His jaw drops open and he shoves Adrian’s shoulder and insists, “No. _No._ That absolutely doesn’t count.”

“I’m just saying,” Adrian concedes with a bright laugh. “She talks about that stuff the way you talk about the ocean.”

It’s touching, actually—the fact that he noticed, how he talks about it like he’s been thinking about it for a long time. Duke slings an arm around Adrian’s shoulder to press a kiss to his temple. “Yeah, yeah,” he hums.

Adrian breaks the spell of softness by ruthlessly teasing, “And if you try to tell me crabs aren’t _exactly_ the same as spiders, you are in for a fight, because I am willing to die on that hill.”

Duke scoffs. “Crabs would kick spiders’ ass, and you can quote me on that one.”

“No, no, no,” Adrian interrupts, “Don’t you go all _Godzilla vs Mothra_ on me. I didn’t say who could win in a fight, I said they’re the _same_.” Duke laughs—the easy, uncomplicated way Nathan used to make him laugh, once upon a time.

That’s the only real _problem_ with his and Adrian’s relationship, really—the fact that so much of it just reminds him of _Nathan_.

After they tuck Jean in for the night and spend a while chatting with Eliza and Richard, they say their goodbyes and get ready to call it a night and head back to their hotel. Just before they leave, Adrian excuses himself to run to the bathroom and Duke finds himself standing in the living room with Eliza. She turns her knowing gaze on him, eyes crinkled with a sad smile.

“It’s always good to see you, Duke,” she says, fond and honest. It makes Duke feel bright and buoyant. Eliza always makes him feel welcome. Family, she told him once. He hadn’t believed it then—not really—but she’d always held to it.

“It’s been too long,” he says. They’re quiet for a moment. Through the wall, they can hear Jean singing softly to herself, even though she’s supposed to be sleeping. Duke feels his heart do a little somersault in his chest. It never fails to shock him just how much he can love that girl. The well seems bottomless.

Eliza knocks him from his thoughts with a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Nathan, love,” she murmurs.

“You and me both,” Duke jokes without thinking. As soon as it’s out of his mouth, reality strikes like a bell and he whips around to look at her. “Wait, what?!”

She holds up her hands as though in surrender and shakes her head. “I know, I know, it’s none of my business. He said you were just friends, but it always felt like there was something he wasn’t saying.” She casts a commiserative smile at him. “Sounds like you think so, too.”

Duke is doomed, apparently, to pine uselessly after Nathan for the rest of his goddamn life in plain view of literally everyone he knows.

“That’s—” he starts, intending to correct her, but it seems like one hell of an uphill battle without much point to it. Tucking his hands into his pockets, he manages an uncomfortable smile and a nod. “Yeah, uh. Well. Thanks. Appreciate it. I guess.”

She casts him a knowing look and it feels like she can see right through him. “Adrian’s nice,” she soothes, “He seems like he really loves you.”

“Yeah,” Duke mumbles, feeling like the floor’s been yanked out from under him—like he’s falling and he’s never going to stop. “He does.”

* * *

They haven’t been back in Haven two hours before shit hits the fan. Honestly, it makes a cosmic sort of sense. Troubles or no troubles, nothing is ever easy in Haven.

Duke doesn’t even see the car coming. One minute, he’s climbing out of his driver’s seat, trying to convince Adrian that Mariano’s out by the docks is a tourist trap of a restaurant and that half their food isn’t even prepared in house. And then everything goes to hell.

He doesn’t actually feel it, is the thing. Not at first. He hears the screech of tires, the impossibly loud wail of the horn. He hears the crunch of metal and glass, but it all seems far away. Like it’s happening to someone else. Like it’s happening in a dream.

His head meets the concrete with a sickening thud. Gravity stops making sense. His eyes are open, but he can’t figure out what he’s looking at. A shape blots out the light. Someone’s talking, but it’s all white noise underneath the ringing in his ears.

He can barely make out details in the man’s familiar silhouette—short, dark hair. The shadow of stubble. Deep-set eyes and a strong brow.

“Nathan?” He slurs, reaching out before it all goes black.

* * *

Nathan flips on his lights and breaks about a dozen traffic laws racing to the hospital. After everything, all the supernatural terror they faced and fought and _beat_, he can’t possibly lose Duke to something as mundane and inconsequential as a _speeding car_. No. No, Duke Crocker is a pirate and hero and there’s no goddamn universe where he goes out like this.

Adrian’s in the waiting room when Nathan gets there, looking pale and shaky. There’s blood on his jeans—Duke’s blood, Nathan realizes with a twist of his gut—and he can’t sit still.

“What happened?” Nathan asks like a cop, because when he’s a cop he can compartmentalize and if he doesn’t compartmentalize, he’s going to do something very stupid.

“It came out of nowhere,” Adrian babbles. When he looks up, his eyes are wide as saucers. If Nathan were thinking straight, he’d have a little sympathy.

Trouble is, Nathan isn’t thinking straight at all.

“Where were _you_?” He barks. As soon as it’s out, Nathan realizes how it sounds. He winces and runs his hands through his hair. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m just—”

“Yeah,” Adrian sighs, dropping his head into his hands. “Me too.”

They don’t talk. Not for hours. Not until a nurse comes through to tell them Duke’s stable but unconscious, that someone will come get them when he wakes up. The relief is something damn near palpable.

Nathan sinks into the chair beside Adrian after hours of pacing. It’s only when he’s sitting down that he realizes how sore his feet are. It’s funny, almost. There was a time in his life when he’d give anything for a sensation as simple as aching feet. Now, hardly a year after the troubles ended, and the shine’s already worn off. Pain and exhaustion are just as irritating and inconvenient to him as they are to everyone else.

He wonders with a turn of his stomach what Duke felt when the car connected with him.

A broken arm, the nurse said. Two broken ribs. A concussion.

The last time Nathan broke his arm, he was eight years old and Duke carried him to the hospital. This hospital.

“So,” Adrian murmurs, breaking the quiet. “You and Duke are pretty close, huh?”

Nathan wonders if he imagines it—the edge underneath the pleasantry. He wonders what it says about him that the idea of Adrian being jealous sparks something ugly and smug deep in his chest.

“Our whole lives,” Nathan says, and maybe he’s doing it on purpose—trying to twist the knife.

“Yeah?” Adrian answers, a false ease to his voice. It’s obvious he’s uncomfortable, that he’s trying to play nice and find something to talk about because he thinks he’s supposed to. “Small towns are just like that, I guess. So. You guys… got along since you were little, then?”

“Not really,” Nathan says, calculatedly casual, “He was too busy pulling my pigtails, at first.” It’s _true_, but it doesn’t mean Nathan needs to say it and it certainly doesn’t mean he needs to say it _now_. Unfortunately, Nathan’s better judgment isn’t nearly as fast as his mouth. “We’ve got a lot of history.”

History. The word hangs in the air, heavy with double entendre.

It’s not a contest. It isn’t. And it sure as hell isn’t appropriate to be throwing jabs at Duke’s boyfriend with Duke bleeding in the next room. Timing has never been one of Nathan’s strong suits.

But Nathan’s not the only one who can hide a little venom behind a smile. Adrian’s the picture of innocence when he says, “Just kinda weird how you’re never around. Never invites you to dinner.”

Nathan keeps his expression placid, unaffected, unimpressed. “We live together,” he drawls, trying to pretend like it doesn’t feel just a little like a checkmate. “I’m around all the time.”

For just a moment, Adrian’s mouth pinches into a hard line. It’s so fast, Nathan almost thinks he imagined it. But it comes and goes, and Adrian’s shoulders drop without an incident. One of them, at least, has enough self-restraint to be an adult about this.

Nathan doesn’t know it, couldn’t know it, won’t ever know it, but all Adrian can think about in that moment is the way Duke looked at him just after he was struck by the car—the way he whispered Nathan’s name in the last few seconds he was conscious. For hours, Adrian was forced to contend with the very real possibility that it might be the last thing Duke ever said to him.

But he keeps that buried. Doesn’t demand explanations or go upending stones looking for snakes underneath them. It may not exactly count as the high road, but he isn’t going to drag out his own insecurities in a moment of crisis. Duke’s _hurt_ and Adrian isn’t interested in fighting with Duke’s roommate or best friend or ex or whatever the hell Nathan is.

So, they don’t say anything—not until one of the nurses calls them back to tell them he’s awake.

He looks awful. The whole left side of his face is mottled with a purpling bruise. Arm in a cast, there are bandages around his hands where he met the pavement. He’s pale, but he lights up just a little when they walk into the room.

“Well, if it isn’t my two favorite boys,” he jokes woozily—although whether his disorientation is from the painkillers or the concussion, they can’t be quite sure.

Adrian hurries to sit on the edge of the bed, carding his fingers through Duke’s bed-ruffled hair. “Hey,” he says softly. He smiles down at Duke, running his thumb along his cheek. “You look terrible.”

Duke laughs, even if the sound is shallow and strained when it pulls at his injured ribs. “You’re a real Casanova.”

Nathan finds himself hovering in the corner of the room, caught between relief and something nastier—something he refuses to call jealousy, even when that world crawls underneath his skin and eats at the corner of his mind.

“How do you feel?” Nathan croaks, hating the unsteady sound of his own voice.

“Like I got hit by a car,” Duke teases, head lolled to the side to beam at Nathan. Duke looks exhausted—beat up and bruised—but behind all that, there’s an almost gleeful light to his eyes that Nathan hasn’t seen in ages.

“Can you _believe_,” Duke laughs, “That we survived the literal end of the world and then I almost got taken out by a goddamn Subaru?”

Adrian’s voice is bright and fond when he pets Duke’s hair and jokes, “End of the world, huh? You’ll have to tell me that story, later.”

“It’s a doozy,” Duke slurs and Nathan tries to bite down on the spike of anxiety that snakes through him at the idea of Duke blabbing to Adrian about the troubles in a morphine induced haze. Adrian probably wouldn’t believe anything Duke said, anyway. And sober Duke has always been good at talking himself _out_ of whatever mess drunk Duke talked himself _into_, so Nathan can’t imagine why this would be any different.

“Did you see the plates on the car that hit you?” Nathan asks, without really expecting the answer to be yes. More than anything, he wants to be _useful_. Standing here, watching Adrian hold Duke’s hand and pet his hair doesn’t just spark that awful, jealous _want_ in the pit of his stomach. It makes him feel helpless. Like there’s nothing he can do for Duke that Adrian isn’t already doing.

“No, _officer_,” Duke taunts, although it’s more affectionate than confrontational, “I did not catch the plates.” He spins a finger languidly in the air. “It was moving very fast and the ground was _very_ hard.”

Nathan crosses his arms tight across his chest and nods. “I’ll try and see if any of the security cameras downtown had an angle on it.” Something to _do_. Somewhere to _be_ that isn’t five feet away, feeling like a voyeur.

“Do me a favor,” Duke drones, and Nathan—shamefully—feels every cell in his body buzz to awareness. “If you find the guy, could you run ‘m over with your truck a couple times? Y’know. Just for like, karmic balance or whatever.”

Nathan can’t help but grin. “Yeah,” he chuckles, heading for the door. “I’ll do that.” He stops just in the threshold and turns over his shoulder to quietly add, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“That makes two of us,” Duke says before Nathan’s out the door and down the hall, trying to talk himself down from the voice in his head that wants him to go back and say something half-cocked and stupid.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Adrian murmurs once Nathan disappears down the hallway.

Duke winces, squeezing Adrian’s fingers. “Wasn’t fun for me, either, I promise.” The painkillers took the edge off, but Duke’s body still feels _wrong_—sore and stiff and weak. He knows that once he’s off the IV, he’s in for a world of hurt. Still, he isn’t dead, which is something.

“You hungry? I don’t know if you’re allowed to have solid foods but I’m not above smuggling you in a cheeseburger.”

“Man after my own heart,” Duke hums fondly, following it up with a weak, “But _please_ don’t talk about food anymore, I might actually puke on you.”

“Concussion, right.” They’re quiet for a few moments, Adrian running his fingers over Duke’s knuckles. Finally, he manages a clumsy, “Listen, I don’t wanna be the jealous boyfriend, but—”

“But what’s up with me and Nathan?” Duke sighs.

“Yeah,” Adrian murmurs, “That.”

“Nathan’s… complicated.” Duke finally concedes.

Adrian tries to keep his tone light when he jokes, “I don’t like the sound of that.”

Shaking his head, Duke pushes down the part of him that keeps turning toward Nathan like a flower toward the sun. He’s known, for a long time now, that he needs to let Nathan go. He made that decision before he ever met Adrian.

Duke thinks of all the fights, the willful miscommunications, all the times he was looking down the barrel of Nathan’s goddamn _gun_. He thinks of all the trouble they used to get into, of the first time he made Nathan laugh, what Nathan looked like in his shirts. He thinks about Nathan holding his hand, in Nebraska—telling him he’d be a good dad.

Complicated really doesn’t begin to cover it, does it?

“We dated in high school,” Duke finally admits. He squeezes Adrian’s fingers—Adrian, whose attention he’s never had to fight for, who doesn’t strive to see the worst in him, who has been good and patient even when Duke didn’t deserve it. He makes a choice.

“Honestly? It was a fucking disaster.” It’s not an exaggeration. Disaster is maybe the only word that describes them better than ‘complicated’.

Looking up at Adrian, he reaches out to run his fingers through his hair—to cup the back of his neck and pull him close. “Doesn’t matter,” He promises, voice soft. “Ancient history.”

“Okay,” Adrian murmurs with a gentle smile. He leans into Duke’s touch, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “I trust you.”

Nathan finds himself frozen just outside the doorway—just around the corner, out of sight, two steps from coming back in the room to ask Duke a follow-up about the model and color of the car that hit him.

Instead, Nathan’s the one left feeling like he’s been struck.

A distant, more reasonable corner of his mind tries to tell him that he’s got no right feeling jealous, no right to be hurt. Somewhere, there’s a voice that reminds him that Duke is _right_. They were a disaster. It was a lifetime ago.

But that voice gets drowned out by the same terrible, roiling _want_ that threatened to swallow him in the hospital room, in the waiting room, in the car on the way over. All at once, Duke stops being the man who dragged him out of his own heartbreak in the wake of Audrey’s loss and, instead, becomes every bad thing that’s ever happened between them.

The switch only takes an instant. It’s so familiar, that old, old rage. It’s so _easy_.

Duke Crocker is a liar. That’s the one fact that Nathan clung to in the damn near ten years Duke spent on the other side of the ocean. Duke Crocker is a liar, because Duke Crocker said he loved him, and he was still willing to leave.

It’s the same mantra he told himself over and over after that disaster of a fishing trip, after a dozen of Duke’s useless apologies, after they found out about Duke’s trouble. Every good thing about Duke had to be an act, because if it wasn’t? Then Nathan’s been white-knuckling a fury that wasn’t earned, not fully, and he can’t accept that reality.

Hearing Duke call them a disaster feels strangely vindicating. Like leaking the air out of a balloon that had been just about to pop.

They got comfortable, after they lost Audrey. Nathan almost, _almost_, forgot about that anger. Almost buried it. But it claws its way back to the surface, shoves every kinder, softer feeling down until he can’t remember why he ever let himself give a shit.

Duke Crocker is a fucking liar. It’s the one, universal constant.

* * *

Nathan does something stupid.

He shows up at Dwight’s apartment, with no warning, wearing the cagey expression of someone with something to _prove_.

It would make more sense to go to Jordan’s. Even with the troubles cured, a part of Jordan still hates him and there’s something in Nathan that _wants_ to be hated, right now. But a part of her still _loves_ him, too, and he can’t be responsible for that. Can’t stand the idea of someone being tender with him, trying to make him feel better. He doesn’t want to feel better; he wants to _forget_.

He wants someone who can hold him down and get him out of his own head.

Dwight is a gamble, but he’s also one with less consequences, in the long run. The worst Dwight will do is tell him no. Jordan might make the mistake of _forgiving_ him.

(No, maybe that first part isn’t true. Nathan’s been through enough to know the worst Dwight could do is _hurt_ him, but he’s also known Dwight long enough to know—without a doubt—he never would. He might be insulted, disgusted, but he’d never lay a hand on him that Nathan didn’t ask for, first. That much, Nathan’s sure of.)

“Awful late for a house-call,” Dwight drawls—casual enough, even if there’s something suspicious in his expression.

Nathan doesn’t waste time circling around the point. “Let me suck you off. That’s it. That’s all I want. I’ll keep my clothes on.”

If Dwight is shocked or scandalized by the suggestion, he does a good job keeping a straight face.

“This can’t be healthy,” Dwight sighs with a damnable kindness that Nathan’s not interested in, right now. He doesn’t push Nathan away, but he tries to be _diplomatic_ about the whole thing which is twice as infuriating as just being told no. “Whatever Duke did—” Dwight starts, but Nathan snatches him by the collar.

“Shut up,” he snarls, feeling hot and humiliated and _hungry_. “I don’t wanna hear his fucking name.” They’re close, breathing the same air. It would be easy to push the last inch into Dwight’s space and give his mouth something better to do. Panting, dizzy with fury and arousal and something awful and vulnerable buried underneath, Nathan groans, “Say mine instead.”

“_Nathan_,” Dwight murmurs, his voice a low rumble that Nathan feels—_feels—_all the way up his thighs and between his legs. Dwight’s hands find the small of Nathan’s back and for a second, the whole room clicks into bright, vibrant hyperfocus. Everything narrows down to the press of Dwight’s hands, the heat of his chest, the puff of breath against Nathan’s cheek. Dwight’s hands drop to his hips, his grip tight and welcome. Nathan tries to arch into it but almost as soon as it’s happening, Dwight’s pushing him away.

Dwight searches Nathan’s expression, his own patient and unreadable when he pushes, “What did he do, Nathan?”

It’s Nathan’s turn to push away. He scrambles out of Dwight’s hold, feeling that same ugly rage bubble up his throat all over again. “Who fucking cares?” He snaps, still caught up in the memory of Dwight’s hands on him. It’s been too long since he’s been touched like that. Even though his anger, there’s this humiliating _need_ he can’t seem to let go of.

Dwight nods, crossing his arms and rocking on his heels. “You should go home. Cool off.”

The part that really gets under Nathan’s skin is Dwight acting like he knows better than Nathan, like Dwight has any fucking idea what he needs.

“I’ll just go find someone else,” Nathan spits, “Don’t act like you’re _saving_ me.”

Dwight runs a hand over his face, unbearably calm in the face of Nathan’s anger. “You’re a grown man, Nathan,” he sighs, a little too placatingly for Nathan’s liking, “I can’t stop you. But I can tell you—as your friend—that this isn’t a good idea.” He levels Nathan with a look that’s so goddamn gentle, it makes Nathan want to scream. “It’s not gonna make you feel any better.”

“So what?” Nathan barks. Immediately, he wishes he could reel the words back in. Dwight gives him this awful, pitying look and—for a moment—the shame burns hotter than the anger does. He stares down at the floor. “Just—forget it. Forget I was ever here.”

He peels out of Dwight’s driveway, the squeal of tires and crunch of gravel drowned out by the sound of his own heartbeat pounding in his ears.

He doesn’t go home that night.

It doesn’t make him feel any better.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My never-ending gratitude to CrownedCarl who always helps me talk my way out of writer's block. You are an angel.
> 
> I hope you guys like this one! Please let me know what you think!

Nathan being mad at Duke is such a universal inevitability, he shouldn’t even be surprised. After over a year of nothing more drastic than petty disagreements, he should have seen this coming. He was overdue.

Except—regardless of whether Duke always _deserved_ Nathan’s anger (and he didn’t always, but often enough he did)—he at least usually knew _why_ Nathan was mad. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe it was unfair. Maybe it was over exaggerated. But Duke still _understood_ it.

He can’t make heads or tails of this.

He hasn’t had _time_ to fuck up.

Nathan, to his limited credit, is at least trying not to act angry. He’s no good at it—never has been—but he’s trying. He keeps Duke updated on the status of the investigation into the hit and run. He even brings a bag of Duke’s things from the apartment, so Duke has something to do while he’s in the hospital. But he’s tight-lipped and unhappy, visibly agitated, uninterested in even the mildest of small talk.

Duke’s tired, frankly. He’s sore and bored and he doesn’t have the patience to humor whatever mood this is. Besides, if he knows anything about Nathan, it’s that he usually burns himself out eventually.

Usually.

* * *

On some level, Nathan’s aware that he’s spiraling. The problem is, he doesn’t want to stop. There’s something terrible and satisfying in indulging in every petty, empty whim the anger dredges up. It easy, being angry—easier than being hurt or confused or hopeless.

Once Duke gets back home from the hospital, Nathan starts staying out late. Sometimes he chases the same manic impulse that landed him on Dwight’s doorstep. He goes home with a few strangers, but he doesn’t really like it. It’s fine for a distraction—satisfying, even, to indulge something carnal and mindless. But touch is an unbearably intimate thing, for Nathan. He thought casual sex was supposed to be impersonal, but he always leaves feeling too _seen_.

It’s not always anything exciting or scandalous, though. Sometimes he just drives himself in circles, music turned up so loud there’s no room in his head for thoughts. He wastes hours like that.

It’s hard to be home when home has been _Duke_ for a long, long time now.

Duke Crocker is a liar, he reminds himself. Duke Crocker tells people he loves them and then leaves. Duke Crocker was always going to leave, someday. No point in getting comfortable.

* * *

Nathan stumbles in at an ungodly hour in the morning, ruffled and exhausted, feeling like a teenager trying to sneak in past curfew. If he lived with anyone else—_anyone_ else—they wouldn’t be awake yet. But of course, Duke fucking Crocker has to be the consummate morning person: standing in the kitchen like it makes any sense to be awake at five in the morning on a Saturday.

“Looks like somebody had a good night,” Duke singsongs from the other room, meeting his eyes through the doorway.

There’s a hickey purpling on Nathan’s neck; all at once, he feels hyperaware of it.

“Not your business,” he growls, adjusting the off kilter set of his collar to something less conspicuous.

Duke clicks his teeth. “Friendly, too.”

Easy as always. Like the whole world’s a joke, to him.

Nathan keeps his voice low and scathing, not looking at Duke as he shrugs out of his coat. “Just because _you_ settled,” he says, “doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t have any fun.”

Duke drops the faux pleasantness in an instant. He slams down his mug a little too hard, the loud clang ringing through the quiet of the apartment. He leaves the coffee behind, heading towards Nathan with a frustrated, “What the fuck is your problem, lately?”

“I don’t have a problem,” Nathan fires back, more on instinct than anything.

In the light from the hallway, Nathan can see the shadow of a bruise still spanning the length of Duke’s face—yellow in the well of his eye, green up against his nose, still purple at the crest of his cheek. The cast on his arm isn’t as hard to look at, but his _face_—it’s this fading timestamp of the day they almost lost him. Even through the humiliation and the rage, seeing Duke like that sets Nathan’s whole world off its axis for just a fraction of a second.

Just another reason not to come home.

Duke almost died and that should be some kind of wake-up call. He almost died, and that’s supposed to be some grand revelation, isn’t it? Aren’t they supposed to be in each other’s arms, waxing poetic about the brevity of life? About seizing the moment and making up for lost time?

But instead, they’re here: standing on opposite sides of the entryway, rehashing the same script they’ve followed for years.

Duke barks out a humorless laugh. “Man, I must have _really_ brained myself. ‘Cause last time I checked—and maybe you forgot—I got hit by a _car_. And then _you_ started acting like a dick. Which has been _very_ nice to come home to, by the way. Thank you oh so much.”

It’s easy to push back. Easy to match Duke’s anger with his own. “I’m trying to find the asshole who hit you, in case_ you_ forgot—”

“What if I don’t need you to be a cop, right now, Nathan?” Duke demands. His broken arm hangs in a sling against his chest and Nathan has to force himself not to stare at it. “What if I need you to be my fucking friend?”

Nathan doesn’t think. (He never does.) “Sure I’m not too big of a disaster for you?” The words all come out at once. Suddenly, he’s got all his cards on the table and he’d do anything to walk back the last ten seconds and unsay it.

Understanding dawns on Duke’s face. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but Nathan really, really doesn’t want to hear it.

(If you can’t make things better, you can always make them worse.)

“Why the hell did you even move in, Duke?” Nathan deflects, but it’s less a question than an accusation.

The shock on Duke’s face gets carried off by an undertow of frustration and he snaps, “Excuse me?”

“You always have an angle,” Nathan seethes. In the back of his mind, there’s a desperate tug telling him to stop, to let it go, to fucking apologize, but it’s like white noise. He’s a cart on a track and he’s picking up speed.

For the first time in a while—a long time, actually—Duke gets properly, genuinely angry. In a perverse, terrible way, it almost feels good: like the shoe Nathan’s been waiting for has finally dropped. Duke crosses the last of the distance between them and shoves Nathan with his good arm—hard, in the chest. A surge of adrenaline rushes to meet him, and Nathan feels electric. They’re good at fighting. He’s good at fighting. He understands _this_.

“What did you say to me?” Duke snarls, so close Nathan could kiss him or break his fucking nose.

“It must have been so goddamn satisfying, right?” He hisses, caught in something bordering on mania. Grief, heartbreak, hurt—they’re all complicated, messy, but this? It’s simple. Familiar. “I was a wreck after Audrey, and you loved it.”

“Oh, fuck you.” Duke grabs him by the shirt. “You think I crashed on your couch for the _power_ _trip_?”

Nathan grins at him—horrible, frenzied, smug.

“You always got off on being _needed_.”

The words go off like a gunshot. For a moment, there’s nothing but silence left in their wake. For a moment, Duke stares at him with an expression so wounded, Nathan forgets why he ever wanted to hurt him in the first place.

Just for a moment.

“You know what, Nate?” Duke says, his voice tight. “Just because you don’t give a shit doesn’t mean nobody else does.”

It’s too gentle. Too honest. It cuts the momentum out from under Nathan, snuffs out his rage like a candle. He tries to cling to that fury, but it slips through his fingers. Without it, there’s nothing left but the quicksand of guilt—already up to his throat, ready to swallow him.

Duke lets go of Nathan’s shirt, stepping back and away. Nathan almost, almost reaches out for him. Almost catches his wrist. But Duke’s already halfway to the door, snatching his coat from the counter as he storms past. Nathan’s hand drops through empty air and Duke doesn’t see it.

“I can’t play this game anymore, Nathan,” he says over his shoulder. There’s still anger in his tone, but it’s muted now. Wilted. “I’m too goddamn old.”

“Fine,” Nathan blurts, “Run away, again. I don’t need you.” It’s one last, desperate, childish push for the upper hand.

Duke stops in the doorway. “Yeah,” he says, voice soft. “When have you ever?”

Just like that, the door closes and Duke disappears.

Nathan drops onto the couch, limbs heavy and leaden like they belong to someone else. It’s a different kind of physical dissociation than he’s used to—the opposite of being numb: hyperaware of the pull of his own skin, the weight of his hands. Like he’s wearing himself as a suit.

In the silence of the empty apartment, Nathan’s thundering heartbeat rings so loud he’d swear it could shake the walls. He can’t calm down.

The details of the argument slip into focus one at a time, like his brain has only just caught up to his body. Like two halves of himself fell out of sync and are only just now finding their rhythm.

Maybe guilt isn’t quite the right word. It’s closer to horror.

* * *

Duke goes to Adrian’s, presumably. Nathan sends a text the next morning but gets left on read. Not that he really expected anything different, but it doesn’t stop the gnawing helplessness in his gut. He spends two days haunting his own apartment, just hoping Duke might come home.

(He doesn’t.)

Blessedly, when Nathan shows up for work on Monday, there’s actually something to _do_.

When he gets to the site of the call, Nathan finds Maud Kelly standing on her porch, shaking like a leaf. It’s a nonviolent B&E, but it’s the most interesting case that’s landed on his desk in months. Although, looking at Maud’s face, Nathan feels a spike of shame over that train of thought. The moment he opens his mouth to ask her a question, she dissolves into tears and he realizes he’s woefully out of his depth.

The first person to come to mind is Audrey. Audrey, who could talk anyone back from the edge. He breathes through the familiar pang of heartbreak that lances through him every time he remembers her, and instead focuses on the warmer part of the memory: all the cases they solved together. All the people she helped. How she reached out and out and out.

“You’re safe, ma’am,” he promises—a little stilted, sure, but genuine. “We’re gonna find who did this. Can you answer a couple questions for me?” When her crying doesn’t so much as slow down, he holds open the door for her and nudges her gently through it. “Let’s, uh, get you inside. You can sit down, take your time.” It doesn’t come naturally to him, but it’s easier when he imagines Audrey there with him.

Talking to Maud is the first time in days that he’s felt like he was _helping_ instead of self-destructing. He’s not good at this part—not the way Audrey was—but slowly but surely, he navigates his way around Maud’s panic and puts together a rough timeline of the scene.

He’s on his way out the door when he spots Dwight poking around the edge of the property.

_Dwight_. Fuck.

Nathan hasn’t spoken to him since the _incident_. And if he hadn’t stopped paying attention to where he was going and banged loudly into the front gate, he might have been able to keep it that way.

As it is, the noise draws Dwight’s attention and any hope Nathan had of making a quiet escape vanishes in an instant.

Clearing his throat, Nathan does his best to keep his voice professional and unaffected when he asks, “What are you doing here?”

There’s no doubt that Dwight recognizes Nathan’s discomfort. He watches with a placid expression, but the look in his eyes is too keen. “Old habits, I guess,” he answers, as casually as Nathan asked, “Used to be, anytime there was a mess in this town, there was a trouble on the other side of it. Guess this one’s more your jurisdiction, though.”

Nodding, Nathan tucks his hands into his coat pockets and rocks on his heels. A ripple of humiliation runs through him. He knows he should apologize for the other night, but that means _talking_ about the other night and he’d honestly rather hop the fence and take off on foot.

Barely able to make eye contact, he forces out an awkward, “Are we… okay?”

“Are _you_ okay?” Dwight counters, but he doesn’t let the question hang too long in the air before brushing past it. “We’re good.” A grin pulls at the corner of his mouth. “Worse things you could do than offer me a blowjob.”

Nathan goes a little red over how _casually_ Dwight says it, but his discomfort balloons into a laugh. “Okay,” he relents, “Okay, yeah. That’s fair.”

“You, uh, find a more productive way to work through your issue?”

Nathan thinks of his fight with Duke and feels his stomach drop. “Uh, yeah. Sure.”

Dwight just stares for a moment, like he’s waiting for the truth, but Nathan just stares down at his feet. “Word of advice, Nathan?” Dwight says finally, shaking his head with an exasperated smile, “Never play poker.”

Nathan winces, but the awkwardness doesn’t flare nearly as high as he expects for it to.

There’s a moment of quiet consideration before Dwight says, “Listen, this—whatever it is you’ve got going on between you and Duke, it’s a little too, uh… complicated for me to get in the middle of. But, as your friend? I’m here.”

Nathan feels a rush of gratefulness, even if it’s underscored with a healthy dose of embarrassment, given the circumstances.

“I, uh, appreciate that, Dwight.”

They go their separate ways, but not before Dwight offers a sympathetic, “I know you don’t wanna hear this, but you should probably try talking to him. Might do you two good.”

Nathan shoots him a clumsy salute and mumbles, “I’ll take it under advisement,” in a weak attempt at a joke.

Despite everything going on in his head, in his life, the biggest thing he feels on his drive home is a sense of _quiet_. Whatever unhinged thing that had taken root in his chest, it seems to have finally let go. Anxiety hovers in the wings, reminding him that he’s not out of the woods just yet—that he owes Duke an apology that feels impossible.

But even so, the world makes a little more sense than it did a few days ago.

* * *

Duke insists on steering the grocery cart with his good arm and his elbow, despite Adrian’s multiple attempts to take over.

“I can do it!” He laughs, dancing the cart away from Adrian’s reaching hands.

“You nearly took out the cracker display!” Adrian argues, caught between exasperation and fondness.

Duke points his good hand at Adrian, saying, “Hey. That thing was _way_ too far into the aisle. The lady behind us hit it too, and she was steering with _both_ hands.”

“Oh my god,” Adrian sighs, throwing up his hands in defeat. He can’t quite keep the grin off his face when he says, “Fine, will you and your very capable cart-driving skills please go pick up some more coffee creamer while I get the produce?”

Duke considers it. “Mm, I should get the produce.”

Adrian rolls his eyes. “Oh yeah, god forbid I get the wrong tomatoes,” he teases.

Duke laughs. “You’re too picky! The ugly ones are still good!”

“Alright, alright. You go get us some hideous vegetables and I’ll grab the dairy. Meet in the chips aisle?”

“You got it.”

Grocery shopping has always been one of the few chores that Duke really, genuinely enjoys. Mostly because he likes cooking, and grocery shopping is just the building blocks of cooking. He gets caught up in it—sorting through the vegetables, planning meals. It’s only when he looks up from his bag of artichokes that he spots a very skittish looking Nathan halfway across the produce aisle, staring at him like a deer caught in headlights.

Duke has made it a very specific point to avoid Nathan, these past few days. Not that it’s particularly hard, given the fact that Nathan works a set schedule at the station and Duke essentially makes his own hours. This accidental encounter is… unfortunate.

It’s so tempting to bolt—just abandon his full shopping cart and grab Adrian and _go_. But he won’t give Nathan the satisfaction. Duke holds eye contact just long enough to prove that he’s _seen_ him and then goes back to his shopping—albeit, a lot less peacefully than before.

He’s virtually indiscriminate about the garlic and onions he grabs from the display, more interested in getting out than finding the best possible produce. Years of gambling had him cultivate a good poker face, but his placid exterior doesn’t do anything to help the thundering of his pulse or the ugly anxiety that beats against the inside of his head.

Just when it looks like he might be in the clear, Nathan steps in front of him.

“Duke, I—” He starts, but Duke levels him with a blank, unimpressed expression.

“Can you move?” He asks dully, motioning to both the cart and the broken arm that makes it difficult to steer. “You’re in my way.”

There’s a moment of hesitation where Duke worries that Nathan might dig his heels in and insist on having this confrontation right here in the middle of the strawberries, but after a tense few seconds, he relents.

“Yeah, sorry,” Nathan mumbles, stepping aside. Duke doesn’t stick around to see where he goes, after that.

Adrian’s already in the chip aisle when Duke turns in a little too fast and nearly careens into the shelves.

“Easy!” Adrian exclaims, rushing to help course correct. One of his hands finds the small of Duke’s back and Duke flinches away. The bolt of shame that hits him when Adrian notices makes the whole thing even worse. Adrian frowns, retracting his hand but not moving away. “Hey—you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah—I’m sorry. Just ready to be home.” He softens, pushing Nathan out of his head as best he can. “C’mon. Let’s get this over with so I can make you dinner, yeah?” He tips forward to catch Adrian in a kiss.

“Best idea you’ve had all day, Crocker,” Adrian hums, but he doesn’t quite relax. Not for hours.

* * *

Duke goes to Nebraska alone.

He needs the time away to clear his head.

Shockingly, Nathan’s called a handful of times since the run in at the grocery store. But he never leaves a voicemail and Duke never picks up, so it hasn’t really gotten them anywhere.

It used to be easy, navigating Nathan’s moods. This isn’t exactly his first rodeo. It sits differently this time, though. Duke’s lost too much, seen too much. Used to be, Nathan’s bullshit mostly frustrated him.

Now, it just hurts.

Jean knows something’s wrong the second he walks through the door, despite the fact that he greets her with a wide smile and a tight, one-armed hug. She squirms out of his hold, pulling back to look at him.

“You’re sad,” she announces. When he laughs in surprise, she doubles down. “No, you’re sad!”

He knows her well enough to know she won’t let him talk his way out of this one. Bested, he sits cross-legged on the floor in front of her, in the living room.

“Okay,” he concedes, reaching out to hold her tiny hand in his own. “You got me. I’m a little sad.”

She plops down in front of him, a frown wrinkling her face. “Why?”

Duke gives her a helpless smile, trying to figure out how to distill twenty years of dysfunction into something a five-year-old can process. He sighs. “Sometimes… sometimes when you know somebody really well, it gets really easy to hurt them. Because you know all the things that make them sad.”

The little frown on Jean’s face only deepens as she thinks about what he’s said. “But you’re not supposed to hurt people.”

Chuckling softly, Duke squeezes her fingers. “No. No, you’re not.”

“Did you hurt somebody?”

Duke finds himself startled by the question. He considers it before answering, “Not on purpose. But yeah. And then he hurt me back.”

“Nana says you’re not supposed to do that.”

“Nana is right,” Duke singsongs. He reaches out to straighten her wild hair where it’s sticking up at every angle, but she just ruffles it again as soon as he’s done.

With the utmost suspicion, she asks, “Was it Adrian?”

He shakes his head.

Realization dawns on her face and the frown melts into something dejected. “Is that why Papa hasn’t visited?”

Duke’s chest goes tight. “Yeah,” he admits, pulling her into his lap so he can hold her close. “I’m sorry, kiddo. It’s not fair to you.”

She clings to his neck. “Why did Papa hurt you?”

Now that is the million-dollar question, isn’t it?

“Your papa and I—haven’t always been very nice to each other. I think… I think I reminded him about a time when we weren’t okay, and it made him sad.” In some ways, explaining it like this is too simple, misses too many important details. In other ways, it makes the whole tangled mess make a lot more sense.

He gently unwinds her arms from around his neck so he can look at her when he adds, “That doesn’t make it okay. You shouldn’t hurt people.” He cracks a smile in spite of himself. “Nana would cook me for dinner if she thought I was teaching you that.”

“That’s a _real_ smile!” Jean suddenly declares with glee.

“What?” He laughs, scooping her up as he gets to his feet. She’s so small, he only needs one good arm to hold her—although, he probably won’t be able to do that for much longer. “What do you mean a real smile?”

“You know,” she says, very matter-of-factly. “Because you’ve got Dad Smiles and Real Smiles. You use Dad Smiles when you don’t wanna tell me stuff.”

Duke’s eyebrows go through the roof. “And how do you know that I don’t wanna tell you stuff, huh?”

“’Cause of the Dad Smile!” She grips his shirt for balance and leans back in his hold to look at him. “You’re bad at lying.”

It takes every ounce of self-control he has not to react to that one. Instead, he considers it a moment and then hums, “Well, I’m glad somebody thinks so.”

Duke goes home with a cast covered in magic marker doodles and one of his first real smiles in days.

* * *

Nathan’s waiting in the living room when Duke gets back. Duke has every intention to brush past him—unpack his things, change, head to Adrian’s. But Nathan gets to his feet when Duke comes through the door, a cowed look on his face.

“Can we—talk?” Nathan asks, looking more shameful than Duke’s ever seen him.

“That’s a new one,” Duke jokes on instinct.

Nathan, to his immense surprise, laughs—weak and a little self-conscious, sure, but a real, actual laugh at his own expense. “Yeah,” he agrees, running a hand through his hair. “I’m, uh, trying something new.”

Dumping his luggage beside the door, Duke sinks into the chair beside the couch. He doesn’t really expect this to go anywhere. Certainly not anywhere helpful. But he can’t seem to resist the urge to see it through. “Alright, cowboy. Shoot.”

‘Talking’ with Nathan, usually goes one of two ways: either, 1) it doesn’t. Or 2) they circle around the problem, barely address it, and call it good.

Duke isn’t at all expecting Nathan to look him in the eye, like he does. Doesn’t expect him to be this subdued and honest when he confesses, “I fucked up, Duke.” He’s restless—has been since Duke walked in—paces the carpet in front of the couch. “God, that doesn’t even begin to cover it, huh?”

“It’s a start,” Duke counters, but it comes off a little too irreverent.

With a heavy, resigned sigh, Nathan loses all momentum and drops onto the couch. Elbows braced on his knees, he watches the floor when he says, “You… really kept my head above water, after Audrey. Don’t know how I’d have gotten through that, alone.” He cracks something like a smile, even if it’s distant. “Don’t know that I _would_.”

For once, Duke’s the one who’s speechless.

Nathan looks at him, finally. “I should have been helping you through this. Instead I just… buried my head in the sand and—lost control.”

Lost control. _That’s_ the tricky part, isn’t it?

Duke sighs.

“You heard what I said to Adrian.” It’s not a question. Duke just wants to hear Nathan admit it. He wants Nathan to have to _say_ why that made him so mad.

The face Nathan makes is nothing short of absolute agony, and Duke might even find that funny if the circumstances were a little different. Quiet stretches between them for so long that Duke nearly thinks the conversation must be over—half expects Nathan to just get up and walk away.

“You weren’t wrong,” Nathan admits, finally, staring down at his hands.

They _were_ good, once. For whole years of his life, the only good thing in it was Nathan. Maybe that’s why it was so easy to look the other way when things went wrong. Maybe he’s been holding onto a ghost of a ghost. But he still remembers the Nathan who looked out for him, who never pitied him. The Nathan who purposefully started trouble just to rile up the Chief. The Nathan who looked at Duke like he was more than what he could _do_ for him. Duke would have followed that kid anywhere.

Anywhere _else_.

Duke’s always wondered if he left _that_ Nathan behind the day he left Haven—if there was ever any world where that Nathan might come back.

Here, now, Nathan drops his head into his hands and sighs. “You made me so _angry_. I get caught up in it and I… I know it’s not fair.”

Maybe Duke’s pushing it with what he says next, but if this is what sends the conversation all to hell then it was bound for that direction eventually, anyway.

“So,” Duke exhales, “Which part made you mad? The ‘disaster’ part or that it’s over?”

Nathan only hesitates for a moment. “We weren’t always a disaster.”

Duke tries to bury the wanton, pathetic little corner of his heart that was hoping Nathan would pick the other answer. He cracks a smile, even if it doesn’t quite feel genuine. “No, we weren’t,” he agrees. Sighing, he claps his hand against his thigh, pushing himself to his feet. “Well, I’ll give us one thing—when we screw up, we sure don’t half-ass it, huh?”

Nathan huffs a little laugh. “No. We sure don’t.”

“Listen,” Duke says, pausing as he lifts his bag back over his shoulder, “I don’t wanna fight like this, Nate. We’re not teenagers anymore. I mean we can—what, save the world? But I say one wrong thing and it’s World War III?”

“I’m sorry,” Nathan murmurs. “I know I haven’t said it. But I am.”

“It’s not just you,” Duke starts, only to recalibrate to, “I mean, _this_ one was definitely you. But—” He rolls his eyes, huffing a little dramatically. “You don’t have a monopoly on stupid bullshit, alright? And that’s the closest to an apology you’re getting from me, right now, because my arm is broken, and I’ve earned the right to be a bastard.”

“Since when have you ever had to earn it?” Nathan teases back—a little cautious, but playful—and Duke’s mouth drops open in delighted shock.

It feels like it used to, the two of them. Before it got ugly.

“Awfully early to be calling me names, Wuornos,” he counters warmly. “You haven’t done nearly enough groveling, yet.”

* * *

Once the cast finally comes off, working at The Gull becomes almost meditative—at least, before it gets packed, every night. It keeps him busy, it isn’t nearly as difficult with two arms, and most importantly it feels _normal_. He could use a sense of normalcy.

Today, Duke gets to The Gull a few hours before strictly necessary, but he finds the empty restaurant strangely comforting. It’s nice—being able to move at his own pace, take the chairs off tables, get a little lost in his head for a while before his feet really hit the pavement. His chefs wander in not too long after he does, and then he’s got the smell of meal-prep to keep him company in the vacant quiet of the bar.

When the bell over the door rings, Duke is poised to tell whoever it is to kindly fuck off until lunch hours, but he finds a bleary-eyed Nathan Wuornos standing in the doorframe.

“I can assure you, officer,” Duke jokes as he wipes down the bar. “My liquor license is up to date.”

“I’m off duty,” Nathan says, pulling up a seat and folding his arms on the counter. “Took the day off.”

Duke crooks an eyebrow, humoring Nathan even if he doesn’t quite understand his angle. “Good place to spend your day off, but uh, maybe wait until operating hours, huh?”

Nathan flashes him a look that, on anyone else, would be pretty lackluster. But in Nathan’s case, it passes for a smile. “But you’d be busy, then.”

A little thrill of something Duke knows better than to name rushes through him, in spite of himself. _You see me all the time_, Duke wants to say, but it feels too close to a much more dangerous conversation.

Instead, he grabs an IPA and keys open the cap before setting it down in front of Nathan. “Yeah well, lucky for you, I’m willing to take pity on you. Now Alice? She catches you in here before we open, and she _will_ boot your ass out the door. Not very nicely, either.”

Nathan doesn’t so much laugh as huff a breath of air through his nose. Reaching for the beer, he turns the label towards him only to make a face. “_Duke_, you know I hate these.”

Duke grins. “Yeah, and you’re not paying for it either, so I guess we’re even. Besides, you have terrible taste. It’s a good beer.”

Nathan takes a swig, dramatically wrinkling his nose at Duke but still going in for a second sip. “It’s an okay beer,” he concedes.

They’re quiet for a moment—Nathan too-thoughtfully peeling the label off his bottle, so he’ll have something to keep his hands busy. Even now, almost two years later, it’s a little odd to watch him fidget. Duke catches himself staring and has to shake himself out of it.

“You didn’t come here to drink beer you don’t like,” Duke nudges gently. “What’s up?”

“I don’t know, it’s… complicated, I guess.”

“When isn’t it?” Duke teases. “Besides, what is a bartender if not a poor man's therapist? C’mon, champ.” He pats the counter. “What’s on your mind?”

Nathan seizes up, for a second. He squares his shoulders, staring down at the bottle in his hands. There’s a moment where Duke’s sure Nathan’s going to duck him and find a very sudden reason to leave. Finally, though, Nathan’s posture drops to something tired and small, and he says, “Been working on this case. B&E. It’s nothing big, but—it’s the first real one since…”

“Audrey,” Duke finishes. It doesn’t hurt just saying her name, anymore, but it’s a near thing.

“I thought it’d be terrible,” he admits, “but… it feels like she’s with me. Like she’s the reason I know what to say.” Nathan ducks his head, running a nervous hand through his hair. Duke notices the motion more than he should, but there’s something comforting in watching Nathan make little, tactile gestures.

Duke doesn’t realize he’s staring again until Nathan offers up a self-conscious, “I know that sounds stupid.”

“Doesn’t sound stupid.”

It's unfairly gentle. Nathan feels that familiar, stubborn tightness in his throat and has to look away. "I miss her," he admits softly, as if it isn't obvious. As if it ever stopped.

It catches Nathan off guard, the moment Duke lays a hand over his own and squeezes. "Me too, buddy."

He laughs, even if it comes out sounding a little thin. "Don't call me buddy."

Duke smiles, soft and warm. "Well, I'm not calling you Chief."

Even when Nathan grins, it comes across a little distant. He can’t stop thinking about her, but the ache that chases her memory feels different than before. “I think—I’m used to her being gone.” He shakes his head. “I hate that.”

Duke pats the back of his hand before letting go. Nathan misses the contact immediately.

“She’d be pissed if you were still moping around all day.”

“You remember her birthday party?” Nathan asks, caught up in the warm glow of nostalgia.

“Where we tied you to a chair?” Duke teases. “Fondly.”

Nathan rolls his eyes, a soft smile on his face. “Before it went to hell. She just—she was so happy. No barn, yet. No double-life.”

Nathan’s smile winds up mirrored on Duke’s face. “You know,” he says softly, “I gotta give Dave credit, that dress looked amazing on her.”

Nathan nods. “She was amazing.” The words could have been heartbreaking, dug up from a place of grief. Instead, they’re colored by a joy that never faded, even if it wound up buried under loss for a long time.

“Remember when she got us that sled?” Duke asks, smiling down at the counter.

“The one that _you_ kept?”

“We have dual custody!” He argues on a laugh, thoughtful for a moment before saying, “Actually, you know what, I’d pay good money to see you go down a hill on that tiny thing. You can have it back.”

Nathan tries to hide his grin when he asks, “You think she hung that mistletoe on purpose to get back at us?”

Chuckling, Duke concedes, “She did hate it when we’d fight.”

The reminiscing starts to lose its momentum, both of them sinking into a contented quiet. But for the first time in a long time, Duke doesn’t want to stop talking about her. His voice is warm and bright when he says, “You know, Audrey used to order the _driest_ martinis.”

Nathan watches him with his chin propped up on his hand. "What," he asks, eyes bright, "you think she should have been mainlining pina coladas?"

“Listen, fruity drinks have their time and place!” Duke laughs, although after a moment he seems to reconsider, “I mean, some of them are a pain in my ass. Like, yeah sure, let me _muddle you some strawberries_ for twenty goddamn minutes. Like have you seen come of these cocktails? You gotta light shit on fire, crack an egg in it, spiral an orange rind. It’s a whole thing." He waves a hand, dismissing the thought. "Anyway, I'm just saying, she could stand to cut loose a little, sometimes. Branch out of gin."

An anxious expression crosses Nathan’s face and then disappears, buried before Duke has a chance to wonder about it.

“Speaking of,” Nathan says, cautious, “You been drinking?”

Duke barrels forward, tone light as ever. “Gin? Not lately. I do make a mean Tom Collins, though.”

Nathan sighs. “You know what I mean.”

Duke's smile doesn't falter, but it goes a little cold. A little painted on. “What, this an intervention? Got the whole gang waiting around the corner like the world’s shittiest surprise party?”

“I’m serious, Duke.”

“At least tell me Dave prepared a speech.”

“I'm worried about you.”

“Don't be,” Duke retorts, but the words hang in the air between them—too heavy, too sharp. Duke tries to find something to busy his hands only to wind up fumbling a pair of shot glasses and dropping them with a clatter onto the bar. He flinches, every muscle going tense before slowly unwinding to a posture that might pass for relaxed to anyone who didn’t know him as well as Nathan.

Sighing, Duke gives up on the act and casts a rueful look at him. "I mean, can you blame me?" He asks in a weak attempt at a joke.

"No," he answers, and Duke finds himself a little shaken by the sincerity. "But Haven's getting better," Nathan says, as tactfully as he can, "And you're getting worse."

Bracing himself on the counter, Duke stares down at the woodgrain and swallows around the lump in his throat. It takes a moment before he manages a quiet, “How’d you know?”

He thought he was careful.

Of all the things Nathan could do next, Duke doesn’t expect him to take his hand. But he does. “I think,” Nathan murmurs, looking ashamed, “I’ve known for a long time. Just didn’t wanna see it.”

“I’m okay,” Duke urges, but he squeezes Nathan’s hand. The idea of letting go feels unbearable.

“One of us has to be,” Nathan says—the echo of something Duke told him a long time ago, “It’s my turn.”

“Careful,” Duke jokes, even if his voice sounds a little embarrassingly fragile, “When you’re nice to me, it makes me feel like I’m dying.”

“Dying,” Nathan says, lacing their fingers together with a tired smile, “is the one thing you are absolutely not allowed to do.”

Nathan hangs around The Gull until the customers start to mill in. They spend that time talking about Audrey and Haven and how different the place is without the troubles to shape it, how they’d almost gotten used to the chaos. Almost two years after the fact, and it’s still the first time they’ve managed to talk about Audrey where the joy was bigger than the hurt. She had to leave them, it’s true. But she left them with so much _good_.

Nathan says his goodbye before the bar can get too busy, pulling Duke into a hug that settles them both.

“This has been… a week,” Nathan says, clumsy and earnest. “Do you—I don’t know, wanna rent a movie?”

Duke squeezes his shoulder before stepping back. “I’m all yours once this shift is over. Just—pick something good, okay? No cops.” A grin breaks across his face. “I see enough cops in real life.”

Nathan rolls his eyes, but he smiles in spite of himself. “Deal.”

Duke feels lighter than he has in weeks. The rest of the shift goes by without incident, and he’s getting everything ready to swap over to the graveyard shift when his phone rings.

“Hey, babe,” Duke chimes, “You okay?”

Adrian doesn’t usually call him in the middle of work—which sets off a red flag—but he sounds calm when he answers, “You get off work soon, right?”

“Yeah, in like fifteen minutes.”

“Can you come over, afterward?”

Duke feels a pang of guilt, but it doesn’t linger. Nathan’s his friend. He’s allowed to have friends. There isn’t a problem. “Sorry, I already made plans for tonight, but I can stop by before, if you need anything? I’ll make it up to you, promise.”

Adrian is quiet for a moment that stretches on too long. Duke feels anxiety rise up his throat.

“We, uh—we really need to talk.”

Trying to hold on to shred of humor, Duke jokes weakly, “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Yeah.” Adrian murmurs, his voice soft. “Me either.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant for this to be the last chapter, but it was going to wind up extremely long and extremely late, so here you go! We're in the final stretch, now!

Duke tries to tell himself he knew this was coming, but the truth is—he didn’t.

They were good, weren’t they? Good together. Good for each other. Happy, or so he thought.

Adrian wasn’t some fling. They are—_were_—on the verge of their anniversary, for god’s sake. He had plans. Was going to take Adrian out on the water, cook him a nice dinner, drink imported wine.

It’s not like Adrian was a rebound. What would he even be rebounding from? A woman who only kissed him once? The same woman who can only exist—and maybe not even then—two decades in the future? The boy from two decades in the past?

Adrian was here. He was real.

He mattered.

(“I love you,” Duke argued, caught in an undertow of helpless confusion. Adrian just stared back at him—only halfway across the room and yet somehow a thousand miles off.

“That’s the problem, Duke. I don’t think you do.” Quiet. Resigned. Part of Duke wanted Adrian to scream at him, call him names, _accuse _him of something. But he didn’t. He didn’t and somehow that was so much worse.

“I’m not _lying_,” Duke pushed, heavy with the weight of the hurt, shocked by it.

“I know you’re not lying,” Adrian sighed. He stared down at his feet. “I think you want it to be love. Really badly.”

Maybe he was right. But what has love ever been except another place Duke wasn’t wanted?)

He was supposed to be home an hour ago.

Parking a few blocks from the apartment, he lets his car idle.

The whiskey in his trunk is meant for The Gull—a last minute restock he was supposed to drop off earlier today. Duke sits gripping the steering wheel for what feels like a lifetime, but it’s only minutes.

He isn’t sure if he’s trying to talk himself out of something or into it.

But it’s not a relapse when he hasn’t even been sober for a day. It’s not a relapse when he never said he was going cold turkey, anyway. It’s not a relapse if he just got broken up with. That’s what people _do_ when they get dumped. They drink.

(“I’m always playing catch-up, Duke. Even when you’re here, you’re not _here_.” Adrian was so calm. Too calm. Like he’d been planning what he was going to say—like he’d been planning it for a long time.

Helpless in a way that bordered on pathetic, all Duke knew to say was a muted, “I’m here. I’m—I’m right here.”

Frustration finally crept into Adrian’s voice, turning it tight and wounded. “No, you’re not. You’re so in love with Nathan, you forgot to be in love with _me_.”)

So, he wallows—long enough to get a good buzz going, to get out of his head, to quiet the voice in the back of his skull that says it’s always going to be like this: the people he loves—or doesn’t love, or wants to love—are always going to leave.

Nathan would have walked into that barn right beside Audrey, if she’d let him. And then Duke really would be chasing after ghosts.

Nathan’s voice in his head, now—louder than anything else:

_You always got off on being needed._

Fuck him.

But he’s right.

See, people don’t love Duke Crocker, they _need_ him. Need him to do something, to be something, to give something. But at least when he does, is, gives, they’re kind. They let him close. Let him curl up in their laps like a dog.

His pride never holds out forever.

Except—

Except Adrian loved him.

Somebody finally, actually, genuinely loved him and he was too much of a fuckup to even love them back. After all, why love the open arms when you can love the closed fist, instead? And hasn’t he always been good at taking hits?

At least when the buzz finally starts to kick in, he doesn’t feel so heavy. Everything takes on a soft focus, including the sharp edge of hurt still tucked underneath his ribs. It doesn’t matter. It’s—distant: a problem belonging to another him, another night.

He almost forgets to leave the bottle behind when he stumbles his way up the block to their apartment. The cold air feels good on his flushed face; not even autumn in Maine can bite hard enough to strip the warmth from the whiskey.

“Honey, I’m home!” Duke singsongs as he swings through the door, voice too loud, eyes too bright. It’s a private joke with himself. See, its funny, because Nathan isn’t ever going to want him the way Duke wants to be wanted. It’s funny because Duke ruined something good waiting on a pipedream. It’s a riot. It’s fucking hysterical.

“Small crisis at The Gull,” Duke lies, since apparently he’s been doing a lot of that, lately, “You know how it is. You pick a movie?”

Duke realizes that Nathan was hovering awfully close to the front door and has to push down the ache of an idea that he might have actually been _worried_ about him. It’s one too many things to deal with in a day that just keeps getting longer.

Nathan meets him at the door, but reels back when he gets close, a startled expression on his face. “Jesus Christ, Duke, you _reek_. You spill the whole bar on yourself?”

(“Look, I got hung up on him for a long time, but that doesn’t mean I’m not here, okay? I’m all in.” The worst part of all of it was how even Duke couldn’t tell who he was trying to convince: Adrian, or himself.

Adrian’s expression went tight. Duke saw him bend, just a little—saw him start to yield—but it didn’t last.

“You’re not good at lying, Duke. Not when it matters.”)

“Doesn’t matter,” Duke insists, his smile glued in place. It _doesn’t_ matter. He’s warm and light and worlds away from his conversation with Adrian. And if he can just hold on to that feeling—the honeyed heat of it—he might actually make it through the rest of the night in one piece.

He shrugs out of his jacket and motions to the TV. “C’mon, what’d you pick?” He’s not doing a bad job keeping himself upright and sober-looking, even if Nathan can smell it on him. The problem comes when Nathan refuses to step out of the way and Duke has to try and navigate around him and—

Well, it’s a lot harder after half a bottle of whiskey.

He stumbles and the expression on Nathan’s face drops in an instant.

Duke clings to his too-pleasant demeanor with everything he has left. “C’mon, don’t look at me like that,” he drawls, clapping Nathan on the arm. “Forget it. Let’s watch the movie.”

Nathan steps away from him—not far, but just outside of Duke’s reach—and Duke feels a new spike of hurt bubble up underneath his buzz.

“You’re drunk,” Nathan says, less angry than this leaden, awful kind of _disappointed_ that Duke’s already heard too much of, tonight.

(“If there’s something I’m not doing, just tell me. I’ll do better.”

A guilty look crossed Adrian’s face. “That’s not the problem, Duke. You’ve been… good to me. But it’s like you’re following a script. You’re not like that with him.”

“Come on, Adrian. We grew up together. It’s—it’s different.”

“Yeah.” Adrian agreed, and for some reason that one word made Duke’s stomach flip. “It’s different.”)

When Duke drops heavily onto the couch, he isn’t expecting the way it makes the whole room _pitch_. For just a moment, he has to grip the cushion just to keep from sliding off.

“Okay,” he concedes, holding up his thumb and forefinger. “I’m a _little_ drunk.”

Nathan sighs. He leans against the arm of the couch without sitting down beside him. It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t hurt. “What happened?”

Duke rolls his eyes, dropping his head back to stare at the ceiling. “It’s fine, Nate,” he promises, all fake smiles and airy laughter. “I told you, small crisis. I handled it. M’sorry I’m late for movie night.”

“What kind of crisis, Duke?” Nathan asks the question with a measured sort of patience, like he’s got a tight grip on the reigns, like he’s trying very hard to be the calmest person in the room. Duke hates it.

“It doesn’t matter,” he insists, “I handled it.”

But Nathan just has to keep pushing in that infuriatingly over-gentle way. “It wasn’t The Gull, was it?”

Duke’s not some wilting flower, he’s not fragile, he’s not interested in being treated like a wounded animal. Everyone all night has been so goddamn _careful _and he wants to _scream_. “Leave it alone, Nathan.”

“Is Adrian okay?”

Duke’s buzz goes sour, careening into something bottomless.

(It wasn’t fair.

Nathan was Nathan: the one constant, the sticking point in a lifetime of leaving. “He’s my best friend.” Duke murmured, helpless. Lost. “He’s all I’ve got.”

Duke had spent so long thinking of it like that, he didn’t even realize exactly what he’d said wrong until he saw the stricken look on Adrian’s face.

“Shit—Adrian, wait. I didn’t mean it like—” But Adrian didn’t want to hear it and Duke couldn’t blame him. He’d have given anything to reel those words back into his mouth, but there was no undoing it.

“You did, Duke!” Adrian barked, raw and hurt. “That’s exactly the fucking problem! You—you _did_. And I am way too old to be playing whatever—game this is.”)

“He broke up with me, alright?” Duke snaps, in a furious rush. “Adrian broke up with me.” Everything starts to feel dizzy, like the whole world’s gone off his axis and Duke’s the only one who knows.

Somehow, Nathan looks even more shocked by the breakup than Duke was. “He—what? _Why_?”

That worried little look on Nathan’s face, the complete and absolute cluelessness, just twists the knife a little bit deeper.

Of course, Nathan doesn’t even know.

Duke lets out an awful, giddy laugh—swept up in the canned euphoria of a decades old confession when he answers, “’Cause I’m in love with _you_.”

Nathan just stares at him—wide-eyed and startled. It’s funny at first. The whole thing is funny. Duke covers his face through another wave of woozy laughter. But Nathan doesn’t stop staring at him. Doesn’t say anything.

It sucks all the air out of the room.

Duke’s still winding down when he sighs, “Don’t look at me like that.”

”I—” Nathan starts, but Duke’s determined to beat him to the punch.

There’s still a tinge of that forced brightness left to his voice, but it’s empty: like a tinny recording on an old tape.

“You don’t need to tell me I’m pathetic. I know I’m pathetic.”

(“You can’t tell me you’re not in love with him, Duke. It’s obvious.” There was anger to the accusation, but not the right kind of anger. Nothing righteous, just a hollow ache.

“I’m not,” Duke pushed, feeling like he was drowning. “It’s over. It’s _been_ over.”

“Maybe,” Adrian conceded. “But I know where you’d rather be. And it’s not here.”)

“I thought we were a disaster,” Nathan says, his eyes fixed on the carpet.

It’s not so funny, now.

As he puzzle-pieces his thoughts together, Duke desperately wishes he wasn’t drunk anymore. Everything’s too bright, too big. Everything he wants to say—or _doesn’t_ want to say—slips through his fingers.

“We were,” he says, finally. He’s already confessed his deepest secret; there’s not much point in finding a sense of shame now. “But since when has that stopped me?”

Nathan runs a hand over his face, more closed off than Duke’s seen him since the day the troubles ended. It tugs at Duke’s heart—makes him want to cross the small distance between them, but he doesn’t dare. Instead, he stares down at his hands to stop from staring at Nathan.

And waits.

Duke loves him. Nathan should be happy.

But Duke is drunk. He’s heartbroken. He’s white-knuckling a version of themselves that neither one of them has been in years. And for once, Nathan understands that what he wants in this moment—what he wants from Duke—might not be the right thing.

“Maybe we should get you something to eat,” he says, after the silence has stretched on so long it’s almost agonizing to break it.

Duke’s got his head in his hands, elbows on his knees. Doesn’t look up when he drones, “That’s it, huh? That’s all you’ve got to say?”

Nathan’s stomach drops. He’s doing this wrong, but nothing feels _right_. If there’s an easy way through this conversation, he doesn’t know it.

“What am I supposed to say, Duke?”

Something comes over Duke, then—something too fragile and desperate to call anger. He lurches to his feet, incensed when he barks, “Anything! Fucking _anything_, Nathan! Tell me to fuck off! Tell me I’m delusional!”

Nathan’s heart jumps into his throat. “I’m not gonna do that,” he murmurs, unable to look Duke in the eye. It makes him feel like a coward, but seeing as Duke wouldn’t even be saying this if he were sober, maybe they’re even.

For a moment, Duke doesn’t answer; he hovers inches away, like he’s daring Nathan to escalate this. Hit him. Kiss him. Somehow, Nathan has a feeling either option would hurt.

Neither one of them moves.

“You asshole,” Duke whispers, but it’s more defeated than furious.

“You don’t wanna do this right now,” Nathan says softly. What he means is _drunk_. What Duke hears is something else entirely.

“Would everyone quit telling me what I want?” Pacing away from Nathan, he’s sober enough not to stumble but drunk enough to wobble when he turns. Nathan watches him teeter and thinks of all the times Duke picked him up off the literal floor, in the months after Audrey.

Duke needs him. Right here, right now. Not as an ex-boyfriend. Not as a life-long crush. Not as a cop and not as a partner in crime. Duke needs a _friend_ and Nathan’s damn well going to be one.

Nathan catches Duke by the shoulders. When he turns him around to look at him, Duke’s uncharacteristically pliant. He could chalk it up to the liquor, to the breakup, but there’s this bottomless ache in Duke’s expression that cuts through him when he sees it.

Trying for something more lighthearted, Nathan urges, “Duke, you’re gonna be so much more pissed at me tomorrow if I let you do this, right now. Sleep it off.”

That ache gets drowned out by something sharper. “It hasn’t been any different in twenty years!” Duke argues, but he doesn’t pull out of Nathan’s grip. “What’s gonna make it different tomorrow?”

Nathan’s heart jumps into his throat. He’s hyperaware of the warmth of Duke’s skin, the flex of his shoulders when he pitches forward like he’s looking for a fight. Hundreds of times, during the troubles, Nathan touched Duke only to be met with an empty void. But now, the intensity’s been dialed up to ten. It was easier, back then, to keep his composure. It was easier to ignore the helpless _pull_.

“Twenty years is a long time,” he whispers.

It’s the wrong thing to say. Or the wrong way to say it. Duke yanks back, shame blooming on his face—shoulders tense like he’s waiting for a taunt or an insult or something much worse.

“Thanks, I hadn’t noticed,” Duke snaps, putting some space between them.

Two steps forward, one step back. It’s the same problem they’ve always had. One of them says something in good faith, the other one takes it the wrong way, they escalate into shouting. Nathan ices him out. Duke makes himself a nuisance to prove a point. It blows over. Lather, rinse, repeat ad infinitum.

So, Nathan doesn’t let it escalate. Sinking onto the couch, he takes a deep breath and considers what he’s going to say next. It won’t exactly diffuse the situation but, he hopes, it might push them in the right direction.

“You could have said something.”

Scoffing, Duke leans against the back of the couch. “Yeah, lotta good that would have done me.”

Keeping his tone as gentle as he knows how—which, honestly, might not be all that gentle in this particular situation—Nathan sighs, “It might have.”

Duke casts him a look of absolute disbelief. “When, in the last _decade_, have you not been pissed at me, Nathan?”

It’s a fair question. Nathan was angry with Duke for leaving, angry at him for coming back. Angry for the fishing trip. Angry about Duke’s family, the troubles, the Hunter. But it all feels like a lifetime ago, now. Aside from one, humiliating setback, Nathan hasn’t felt that anger in a long time.

“Almost two years,” he answers, honest.

Duke stares back at him, helpless with a new kind of hurt that Nathan can’t even apologize for, because he doesn’t understand where it comes from.

“That was after Audrey,” Duke says, voice soft and raw.

“I know.”

Duke watches him, an expression on his face that Nathan can’t parse—like he’s reaching deep inside of himself for words that are almost impossible to say. Nathan doesn’t know if he should be frightened of those words or desperate for them and finds himself on the cusp of both.

“I was ready to be a lot of things for you, Nate,” Duke admits, subdued, “But I couldn’t be the place you buried her.” He breaks on a noise that should be a laugh, but there’s no humor. It’s this broken, empty sound. “I had to get to keep some part of both of you for myself, or I was gonna go crazy.”

Tipping into an ache that seems to carve through the core of himself, Nathan struggles to find his voice when he urges, “That’s not what I wanted.”

“I know,” Duke promises. He looks away, jaw tight. “But it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have. Sometimes it was like—like you looked right fucking through me.”

“Duke—”

“I’m not mad, Nate. I get it. But you asked why.” He sighs, finally meeting Nathan’s eyes again. “That’s why.”

Nathan reaches for him without thinking. Their fingers brush in midair as Duke pulls away.

“Don’t you pity me, Wuornos,” he murmurs, voice tight. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Nathan’s hand drops uselessly onto the back of the couch.

All it would take is a few small words to change the trajectory of this conversation. He could tell Duke the truth—the one he buried so deep, even he was scared to look directly at it. He could tell Duke that, regardless of what they would or wouldn’t have been in the immediate aftermath of Audrey, things are different now.

The truth is that Nathan’s always loved Duke, other things just got in the way. Often it was anger, sometimes it was fear, and most recently grief—and then the hollow acceptance that clung in the wake of grief: this heady certainty that he’d never find that kind of love ever again.

Even when he already had it.

But Duke is drunk and impulsive and bruised, and Nathan isn’t going to hang their chances of a future on this moment. He won’t hand something that fragile to a man trying this hard to self-destruct.

“We should talk when you’re sober,” Nathan says, even though he _knows_ it’ll set Duke off again. But they’re good at arguing. They’ve been doing it for three decades. It’s the other part that he can’t afford to mess up.

Duke doesn’t yell, but he barks an ugly little laugh. “No thanks.” He heads for the stairs, and Nathan knows there’s nothing else he can do to fix the mess they’ve made, tonight.

He’s already halfway up when Nathan offers a gentle, “I’m sorry. About Adrian.”

At first, he’s met with nothing but silence, and he thinks that’s going to be it. But, distantly, he catches a mumbled, “Thanks,” as Duke turns the corner and disappears.

Duke loves him.

Duke loves him, but for some reason the butterflies in his stomach feel more like nausea than anything. They’ve already gotten so much wrong. It seems impossible that they might finally get it right.

* * *

Duke’s been on his fair share of benders. Waking up in his jeans, covered in sweat, and sick with a headache is far from the worst he’s ever done. But the lightning bolt of stomach-twisting dread that hits when he remembers running his mouth about _being in love with Nathan Wuornos_?_ To Nathan goddamn Wuornos_? Yeah, that just might scare him off of drinking for good.

He’s pretty sure he hits all five stages of grief in under ten minutes.

He could just stay in this bed forever and never look anyone in the eye ever again and that would probably be alright. That would be fine. He’s made enough of a fool out of himself in the last day or so. He could just—lay face down in his throbbing headache and never leave.

God knows it’d be better than having to look Nathan in the eye, after last night.

It takes damn near half an hour, but he does eventually talk himself into a shower. The warm water feels nice, but everything else about it is loud and grating, all the way down to the patter of water against the tile floor.

He considers his options.

It’s a Sunday. It’s past noon. Nathan is definitely: home, awake, waiting in some public area to _talk_.

Even with the bathroom on the second story, Duke still calculates the pros and cons of tumbling wet and naked out the window for the sake of avoiding Nathan entirely.

Eventually, though, he braves the slow process of putting on clothes even when he’s dizzy and sluggish, and all but melts down the stairs.

Immediately, Duke understands Nathan’s general disgust with him most mornings. Seeing someone _that_ chipper and alert when he feels like _this_ hits like the emotional equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.

“I made coffee,” Nathan offers—which is a damn good start, all things considered. Duke reevaluates his instinct to smother Nathan with a pillow.

There’s already a mug waiting for him next to the coffee pot and—alright. Fine. That softens Duke up a little. A lot.

Caffeine acquired, Duke drops heavily into a chair at the kitchen table with a groan.

“Fuck, my head hurts,” he groans.

Nathan watches him from over his own coffee cup—probably his second or third, this time of day. “I tried to get you to eat last night, but you wanted to yell at me,” he remarks, more amused than irritated.

Huffing a laugh through his nose, Duke mumbles, “Well, at least I had my priorities straight.”

Rather than sitting across from him, Nathan pulls out the chair cattycorner. He can’t pinpoint what it is specifically about that particular choice, but something about it makes anxiety bubble up Duke’s throat. (To be fair, he could probably also attribute that feeling to the hangover.)

Arming himself with an air of disinterested cynicism, Duke sighs, “I can’t believe I’m about to get dumped twice in twelve hours.” He waves a hand. “It’s fine, Nate. You don’t have to let me down easy. Don’t blow a gasket.”

“Hard to dump you when I wasn’t dating you,” Nathan mumbles, a shy lilt to his voice that might almost be a tease if it weren’t so cautious.

“Lest I forget,” Duke drones, but a little of the tension unspools from the air around them.

Nathan raps his knuckles on the tabletop. It takes him a few moments to pull his thoughts together—or maybe to muster up the courage to voice them. When it comes to Nathan and _feelings_, it’s hard to tell whether any particular hang up comes from the feelings themselves or opening his mouth to express them.

“First,” Nathan says, “I need to know—now, sober—if this is something you actually want.”

Duke opens his mouth to speak, but Nathan interrupts him with a pointed, “Don’t bullshit me, Duke. I mean it.”

His stomach flips. It’s not entirely nerves but it’s not _not_ nerves, either. Looking away, Duke murmurs, “Never thought it was on the table.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Nathan pushes—not unkind, but firm. He won’t let Duke wander and Duke isn’t sure if he loves him or hates him for it.

Running a hand through his hair, Duke wonders why it’s so hard to confess to something when he’s already said it. Even if he lied now, even if he walked it back, Nathan would always _know_.

“For a long time, yeah,” he admits. The second it’s out, the closed fist around his heart lets go. Anxiety still flutters through his chest like bird wings, but it’s different than it was before. Easier. Lighter. A twenty-year secret finally let off its leash. And without pretense, without liquid courage, without trying to prove anything: words spoken in the light of day, to Nathan’s face.

“Still?” Nathan asks.

Duke levels him with a look. “That’s a stupid question,” he says, but there’s no edge to it.

“Humor me.”

Mouth dry, Duke swallows around the lump in his throat. He wants to believe this is going somewhere besides a gentle let-down, but hope is such a goddamn dangerous thing when you’ve wanted someone this long. “Yeah. Still.”

Nathan doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look away.

The moment becomes almost surreal, almost out of focus—almost like he’s watching from the third person, like in a dream. Nathan’s hand falls on his knee, feather-light at first, until it takes his weight as he leans closer.

Duke tips forward like he can’t help it, like he’s been pulled into Nathan’s gravity. But maybe that was always inevitable.

They meet in the middle. Gentle. Cautious. Duke’s hands hover helplessly just a few inches short of cradling Nathan’s face—almost afraid of the contact, like it might shatter the illusion and ruin everything.

Twenty years of wanting and it’s such a small, chaste little kiss.

Nathan opens his eyes first, which Duke only knows because he _laughs_, gentle when he teases, “What, I can finally feel it and _now_ you won’t touch me?”

“Shut up,” Duke mumbles, unable to keep the smile out of his voice. Pushing down that last flare of doubt, he catches Nathan by the back of the neck and drags him in again.

Not even the headache from hell could take this from him.

He pays attention to the details: fights through the haze of unreality and the pulse of his hangover and notices the way Nathan’s breath hitches when Duke opens his mouth. How his grip on Duke’s thigh turns almost vice-like, how every muscle in his back goes tense and then relaxed—leaning into Duke the same way Duke leans into him.

They were teenagers the last time they kissed.

Nathan is nothing like Duke remembers and everything like he remembers. Nathan’s always been like this: eager and careful, all at once, like he’s afraid to let himself want too much. The sound he makes is achingly familiar, but the drag of his stubble against Duke’s mouth is entirely new. It makes everything electric.

When he pulls back—although god knows he doesn’t want to, at all, ever—he notices Nathan’s other hand white-knuckling the edge of the table. Raising an eyebrow, he teases, “Now who’s keeping his hands to himself?”

Nathan laughs—a self-conscious, uncomfortable sound—letting go of both the table and Duke’s knee all at once. Duke regrets the comment immediately; all he wants are Nathan’s hands on him. “Just, uh—trying not to move too fast.”

With Duke still cradling his neck, Nathan can’t go far. Hard as they’re both trying to look composed, it’s a losing battle. Duke squeezes the back of Nathan’s neck just to revel in the way his eyes fall closed and his face goes serene.

“It’s been twenty years, Nate,” he murmurs, “I don’t think we could move any slower if we tried.”

Nathan smiles down at his lap, pleased and bashful the same way he used to get when Duke would flirt with him, all those years ago. Of all the things he could say in this moment, what he comes up with turns out to be something of a curveball.

Nathan asks, “How many dates do you think we’ve been on in the last two years?”

Duke knows the meaning of those words, and he understands what they mean in that order, but he cannot for the life of him figure out what Nathan is trying to say. “What?”

Nathan rolls his eyes, still caught in that embarrassed hush. “C’mon. You show up with wine, make dinner. Drag me out to farmers markets at five in the morning and then have me pick what we get to eat. I’m just saying. Someone might call it romantic.”

Duke laughs—a soft, awed sound. He’s on the edge of his chair, their knees bumping together when he tips forward to nose Nathan’s jaw. “_You_ didn’t.”

“Yeah,” Nathan agrees, cradling the back of Duke’s head. “But I’m an idiot.”

Duke’s hands find Nathan’s waist. There’s something almost intoxicating to the way Nathan shivers, how he arcs into the slightest touch.

“You said it, not me,” Duke teases. He dips to press his mouth to the long line of Nathan’s neck. The first kiss earns him a soft, bitten off noise, but the second—when he opens his mouth and chases it with tongue—it makes Nathan _yank_ his hair in a way that doesn’t seem entirely intentional. Duke lets himself be dragged back, barely aware of the sharp moan that falls from his own mouth.

For a moment, they’re both caught like that: Duke open mouthed and breathless, held by the hair a few inches away from Nathan’s face. Nathan, wide-eyed and frozen, unable to look away.

“Jesus Christ,” Nathan all but gasps in the moment before he tugs Duke back in. It’s not nearly so careful, this time. One hand still in Duke’s hair, Nathan wraps the other around his shoulders, practically pulling him out of his seat. Twenty years of waiting and it’s almost worth it to have Nathan desperate like this.

Nothing in the world is ever going to be as good as the sound he makes when Duke rucks his shirt up in search of bare skin. Nothing will ever drag the air from his lungs like how Nathan flinches back and then surges forward, pressing into Duke’s hands, sighing a broken, little, “please,” against his mouth.

There’s barely space for Duke to pant Nathan’s name before Nathan crashes into him again. If his head weren’t pounding, he’d already be on his knees.

Fuck. _Fuck_, he’s dizzy. And not in the romantic sense, either.

“Nathan,” Duke groans against his mouth. He’s not exactly trying very hard to put the brakes on. That fistful of hair Nathan’s keeping an iron grip on scatters his thoughts every time Nathan pulls. “_Nathan_,” he urges, finally planting a hand in the center of Nathan’s chest to push him gently back. Nathan tips forward almost instinctively, chasing Duke’s mouth—a little wild-eyed, a little frantic, a little lost—and it’s one of the most beautiful things Duke’s ever seen and he’s really kicking himself for not shutting the fuck up and drinking some goddamn water before he fell asleep, last night.

A wounded confusion starts to bloom on Nathan’s face, followed close behind by _panic_ and Duke rushes to stop that train before it rolls off the tracks. “Hey. _Hey_, I don’t wanna stop.” He chuckles through a pained groan, “but it feels like my head’s gonna explode.”

Understanding dawns on Nathan’s face and he drops against the back of the chair with a frustrated sound. “You just had to be a stubborn asshole last night, didn’t you?”

Duke’s not willing to give up touching him just yet, headache or no headache. He runs his hands up Nathan’s thighs in a gesture that might be apologetic if it didn’t make Nathan cant his hips looking for more. He makes a gorgeous, shattered noise—head tipping back and legs drifting further apart like an invitation.

All Duke can think about is how badly he wants to sink to the floor and get his mouth on him. The only problem is how sharply that arousal winds up undercut by the nausea of his hangover.

Maybe that’s not the _only_ problem.

There’s guilt buried in there, too, if he looks directly at it. Guilt over Adrian, over a breakup that’s barely twelve hours old. But he really, really doesn’t want to think about that, right now.

“You’re the one who wanted to go slow, remember?” Duke jokes weakly.

Nathan lets out a thin laugh, gripping Duke’s wrists to stop him rubbing his thighs. “I changed my mind.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Duke promises, closer to a moan than he means for it to be. Nathan squirms like he can _feel_ the timbre of Duke’s voice and damn if that doesn’t make it even harder to let him go.

Finally opening his eyes, Nathan sits up and cradles Duke’s face in his hands, tugging him into a kiss that veers a little too filthy before he remembers himself. He presses their foreheads together while they both catch their breath.

“I’m gonna just—” Nathan mumbles as a flush creeps up his neck. “I’ll—I’m just gonna shower. Yell if you need anything.”

“A shower, huh?” Duke murmurs, his voice pitched low and teasing, “You sure that’s all you’re doing?”

Nathan’s flush blooms a shade darker, but there’s a shameless edge to his voice when he whispers, “Maybe if you’d listened to me, you’d be doing it instead.”

A shiver carves through him like a lightning bolt. Groaning, Duke all but chases Nathan’s mouth when he sighs, “Oh, fuck y—” He cuts himself off, but not soon enough.

“Me?” Nathan finishes for him, innocent as anything. “Somebody has to.”

His shower takes an awfully long time.

It’s not fucking _fair_, because Duke’s head feels like someone’s trying to drive a nail through it, which really takes the fun out of how hot it gets him. He winds up laid out on the couch, one arm over his eyes, the heel of his hand pressed between his legs to try and ease the ache. (But not before finding out the hard way that he is, in fact, way too hung over to get himself off. The world was, is, and continues to be unbearably cruel.)

* * *

The universe must have decided to call Duke on his bullshit, because he gets woken up from his miserable hangover nap to a frantic phone call from his kitchen manager and a real and actual crisis at The Gull.

A break in, and by the absolutely murderous tone in Alice’s voice, Duke’s a hell of a lot more worried about whatever poor schmuck picked them as a mark than he is over Alice’s emotional state.

“You call the cops?” Duke asks, rubbing his throbbing temples and staring up at the living room ceiling.

“No, I found everything torn all to hell and I called you. Like you told me to.”

“Woman after my own heart. Alright, just give me like, twenty minutes and I’ll be there.” He hangs up, only to immediately fumble the phone and hear it clatter to the floor in an absolute nightmare of sound.

When it rains, it pours or whatever.

It’s not until he sits up that he realizes he wasn’t covered in a blanket when laid down. Nathan must have found him passed out, post-shower and tucked him in. It’s such a small thing and it makes his heart stutter anyway.

“Hey, Nate?” Duke calls, rather than wander the apartment looking. He nearly levitates off the damn couch when Nathan just appears behind him.

“You have a good nap, Sleeping Beauty?” Nathan chimes, unfairly fresh-faced and satisfied looking.

Duke rolls his eyes and tries very hard not to let his mind wander at the sight of Nathan’s still damp hair. “That’s very cute, but I need cop Nathan right now.”

Nathan’s demeanor shifts so immediately, there’s a second where Duke thinks he’s fucking with him. “What happened?”

It’s not a joke, though. It’s just Nathan. Duke wonders, not for the first time, why he had to go ass-over-teakettle for this absolute nerd. The surge of fondness in his chest is answer enough, though.

“Somebody trashed The Gull.”

Nathan’s eyes go wide. “B&E?”

“You think it’s the same guy?” Duke makes a face. “A bar’s a pretty big jump up from stealing silver from an old widow.”

Nathan shakes his head, convinced. “We’ve barely had so much as a noise complaint in two years, but now we’ve got _two_ cat burglars? No, it’s gotta be the same guy.”

Levering himself to his feet, Duke bites back a groan when the room spins just a little. “Alright, gimme like five minutes to change and we can leave.”

“How’s your head?”

“Not as fucked as this jackass is gonna be when I find him,” Duke grumbles as he heads for his room.

Nathan’s laughter follows him all the way up the stairs. Even with the awful pounding in his head, there’s an odd, surreal kind of comfort in knowing that Nathan’s downstairs, waiting for him. That maybe Nathan’s _been_ waiting for him for a long time.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, I've done it again. I've gotten halfway into a chapter with every intention of ending the fic, only to realize that there's just too much left to do. For what it's worth, this COULD have been the last chapter, but it would have been 20 thousand words long and not posted for another three weeks. So, you get a bonus chapter. I promise, next one is definitely the finale.
> 
> A HUGE thank you to CrownedCarl and Parker-Haven-Wuornos for all their support and brainstorming help on this piece. I seriously could not have done it without you.
> 
> Please comment if you like it :) Feedback keeps me going when the going gets rough (and this fic has certainly been a rollercoaster).

Duke promised Alice he’d be at The Gull in twenty minutes, but it takes the two of them a little longer than that to actually get there. A delay which has everything to do with the post-church Sunday traffic and absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it took them three tries to get out the front door—each attempt interrupted by Duke pinning Nathan to the wall and kissing him brainless.

But that’s completely unrelated. And if Nathan’s still a little pink and dazed-looking by the time they roll up to the bar, well—blame it on the chill of autumn in Maine.

Nathan, to his credit, focuses well enough once they get there. He’s in his element, after all. (Even if Duke’s never quite gotten used to the idea that the teenaged delinquent he used to know grew up to be a police detective. Either the universe has an even sharper sense of humor than he thought, or—more likely—Nathan just figured out how to channel his habit of running headfirst into trouble into something ‘productive’.) Before heading inside, Nathan crouches down to examine the battered looking lock on the front door.

Hovering behind him, Duke comments idly, “Did a shit job picking the lock.” He stands just a little bit too close to be considered casually friendly.

Nathan looks at him over his shoulder with an affectionately exasperated expression. “He got in,” he points out.

Gesturing towards the lock, Duke says, “Yeah, but he made a fuckin’ mess. It’s not supposed to _look_ like you picked it.”

“Exactly how many locks have you picked, Duke?” Nathan asks, more teasing than confrontational—although maybe a healthy mix of both.

Duke grins, breezing past Nathan into the bar. “None you can prove,” he sing-songs. His head still aches, but it’s a dull, background noise rather than an ever-present, nauseating agony. And it’s easy enough to ignore when he’s got something a lot more pressing to worry about.

Alice was right; the place is absolutely trashed. Not so much the seating area, but the bar, the register, the back. Anywhere there could have been something valuable. She stands in the center of the chaos, along with a couple confused line cooks.

“We were gonna start prep,” Mark explains, looking sheepish, “But, uh, the walk-in’s been open all day.”

Dread sinks through Duke like a stone and he sighs, running a hand over his face. “Great, just what I needed.” He looks the place over again, before waving a hand in surrender. “Alright, you guys can go home. No way we can figure it out before dinner.”

Nathan cuts in with a pointed, “Alice, can you stick around? Just need to ask some questions.”

While Alice talks with Nathan about the details of the scene, Duke pokes around at the damages. The door, the ruined food, the broken bottles—he counts up all the expenses he’s got before this place is up and running again. The damage seems pretty standard at first glance: shelves rifled through, drawers pulled out, a healthy dose of unnecessarily destroyed property. About what he expected when he got the call.

It’s the paperwork that catches Duke’s attention. It litters the floor—tax forms, income reports, expenditure lists. Pulling out a drawer in search of something valuable is one thing, but these look… purposeful. Examined. Like maybe whoever was in here wasn’t looking for something valuable at all.

At least, not in the traditional sense.

He finds his old shipping ledger in a pile of other official folders and files, no more ruffled-looking than anything else. Duke only kept it at The Gull in the first place because of the early days when he was making some not-quite-above-board imports for special menu items. Ever since he walked away from the less savory side of his business dealings, he hasn’t had a reason to touch the thing.

Nathan still seems engrossed in his conversation with Alice, and Duke figures he’s got some time to kill before the police report gets filed and he can get on with putting this place back together.

Picking the ledger up, he flips idly through the pages. It’s not written in code, exactly—he’s not _that_ paranoid—but it’s missing enough context that it would be entirely useless to someone who didn’t know exactly what they were looking for.

Nothing _seems_ out of place. He feels a little stupid, actually, for even entertaining the idea that some run of the mill burglar might give two shits about it. Even if the thief knew what he was looking at (unlikely), what could he possibly want with largely obsolete haul information from a journal Duke hasn’t touched in two years?

Nearing the end of the used pages, Duke almost sets it down. Except—no. No, something’s off. The pages are bound saddle-stitch, and as he turns through them, one tugs away at the fold as though the other side no longer exists.

Someone’s torn out a page—no, several pages—and it sure as shit wasn’t him.

Duke wonders what it says about him that the realization brings something closer to giddy excitement than anxious worry. Duke doesn’t mind the quiet that his life became, but there’s a reason he never went looking for it.

Carefully, he works backwards to the missing pages. He almost passes right over them; they’ve been removed meticulously, with nearly no evidence of the tear left behind: just the tiniest ragged edge peeking out from the seam of the binding. It’s the opposite of the chaos of the rest of the restaurant. This was no rush job. It was immensely deliberate.

When Duke heads back into the front, Nathan’s still mid-interrogation with Alice.

“And the door was open when you got here?” Nathan asks.

Alice looks like she’s just barely resisting the urge to be willfully uncooperative. Duke knew he liked her. “Like I said,” she sighs, voice flat, “Door open, seagulls everywhere, register smashed on the floor.”

“I don’t think he cared about what was in the register,” Duke interjects as he crosses the room. He holds up his ledger. “Pretty sure this was personal.”

Nathan raises his eyebrows at Duke, and they exchange a few meaningful looks before Duke says, “Alice, you can go home. Take tomorrow off, too. You earned it after all this crazy shit.”

Alice wastes no time in heading for the door. “Damn straight,” she agrees, pausing only briefly to add, “Uh, good luck, I guess.” Duke salutes a goodbye and she’s gone.

Nathan’s focus drops to the ledger in Duke’s hands. “Personal how?”

Duke flips to the missing pages, not that it means much of anything seeing as he can’t show what isn’t there. “This?” He says, pointing to the frayed edges along the seam of the book. “Was my client list, back when I was hustling. Regulars. The ones who paid the big bucks. That’s some pretty valuable information, in the business. Not really surprised somebody would wanna steal it. I _am_ surprised that he knew to look for it.”

Nathan’s brows draw together, dimpling in a little crease that Duke absolutely doesn’t find endearing, because that would be ridiculous and over-the-top and unbearably sappy.

“Somebody you knew?” Nathan asks.

“Somebody I worked with, probably.” It’s not exactly a short list. Duke moved cargo for well over a decade, some of it more legal than others.

Looking around to examine the mess the burglar left in his wake, Nathan asks, “So why trash the place?”

“See, I’ve been wondering about that,” Duke says, shaking the book for emphasis. “If I thought they were just after cash—”

Nathan cuts in, finishing the thought. “Then you wouldn’t notice the pages.”

“Bingo,” Duke chimes. “Sorry to ruin your whole theory.”

Nathan makes that face again, the one that Duke definitely doesn’t find charming. “My what?”

Waving a hand, Duke says, “About the robberies being connected.”

It’s like a lightbulb goes off over Nathan’s head. “No, no, no, no, hang on,” he mumbles, pulling a face while he goes over the details. As though struck by some kind of divine inspiration, Nathan all but gasps, “Nothing was stolen.”

Duke can never follow when he does this. “What?”

Nathan’s figured something out, a bright, shocked understanding dawning on his face. Duke, personally, would very much like to be included in the revelation.

“From Maud,” Nathan says, “She went over that place top to bottom. Nothing was missing.”

“Okay,” Duke urges, starting to get frustrated by the extra layers of mystery. “What the hell does that mean?”

Completely unfazed by Dukes irritation, Nathan finally gets to the point. “Maud’s only been living there for a couple years. Before that, it was the Haskell house.”

Haskell. Now _there’s_ a name Duke could have gone his whole life without hearing again.

“Hold on—_Ian_?”

Ian Haskell—a shit smuggler and a worse friend. Unreliable, terrible under pressure, selfish even by criminal standards. Whoever came up with the saying “no honor among thieves” definitely, undeniably knew Ian goddamn Haskell. The man damn near brought all of Haven to the ground, and for what? A score? An old puzzle that would have been worthless to anyone not in the know about the troubles, anyway? Ian’s petty revenge plot might have made sense when they were twelve. Coming back as an adult just to try and wreck the place had to be a new low.

God, Duke hated that fucking guy.

Nathan’s still chasing his thought, adding, “If the burglar didn’t get the memo that Ian died—”

“Then maybe they thought he knew something.” Now things are starting to make sense. Duke makes a frustrated noise, dropping the ledger on the table with a thump. “Man, even from the grave that little weasel’s still fucking me over. Unbelievable.” He taps the back of the chair in front of him, thoughtful. “Okay, but why now? It’s been months since the Haskell house. What took him so long?”

“Well, Ian wasn’t your only, uh, _business_ _associate_—”

Duke has to bite down on a laugh when Nathan makes it sound like he’s trying to tactfully navigate around some kind of extramarital affair.

“Maybe he’s been shaking down the others,” Nathan says.

It would make sense, except— “I thought you said there were only two break-ins?”

Nathan raises his eyebrows. “How many of your old smuggling buddies would have called the police?”

Duke has to concede that one. “Alright, you got me there.”

Nathan skims through the ledger, and Duke wonders what kind of bizarre universe he’s tumbled into that a cop is looking through his very illegal business dealings and he’s _not_ the one under arrest.

“Any idea who might be after you?” Nathan asks without looking up.

“Can’t be anybody stateside or they’d have made this play a hell of a lot sooner.” He clicks his teeth, running a hand over the back of his neck. “Gotta be honest, Nate. Not a lot of difference between friends and enemies, in that particular line of work. And I had some pretty impressive connects by the time I got out. Doesn’t have to be somebody with a grudge to want that list.”

“Well that narrows it down,” Nathan drawls, even if his half-quirked smile takes the edge off his sarcasm.

Duke grins, bumping their hips together when he jokes, “If it makes you feel any better, the list of people who’re pissed at me isn’t much shorter.” It’s easy to step into Nathan’s space. They’ve been doing that for years, anyway—ignoring boundaries, finding excuses for casual touches. It’s different now, though, when their real intentions aren’t buried beneath ten different layers of denial.

“Why am I not surprised?” Nathan teases, but the way he gasps just a little bit when Duke leans in for a quick kiss ruins whatever rhetorical leverage he might have had.

Tugging playfully on the hem of Nathan’s shirt, Duke laughs, “At least I’m on _your_ good side, for once.”

Nathan makes a real effort not to break into a smile, but in the end, he loses the battle. Grinning a little bashfully down at the table, he mumbles, “Yeah, well, we’ll see how long that lasts.”

Duke kisses him again just for good measure.

Nathan spends most of the day chasing leads that turn into dead ends. He’s able to find confirmation—through hearsay and nosy neighbors, mostly—of a couple more break-ins, but he never finds anyone who actually got eyes on the thief. Whoever it is, they’re either incredibly good or almost comically lucky. The victims of the supposed break-ins are just as reluctant to speak to the police as Nathan expected them to be, and he spends most of the day getting doors slammed cheerfully in his face.

Duke, on the other hand, has the even less fun task of prioritizing repairs and restocking perishables. He could replace the lock on his own—done it plenty of times before—but the thief brute-forced it so badly, they splintered the wood around the latch. Adding carpentry to locksmithing might not technically be out of his paygrade, but it’s a more time-consuming issue than he’s got the patience or the resources to deal with. So, he calls in a proper locksmith, as well as a couple extra hands to help him move a frankly heartbreaking amount of food gone bad. It’s thankless work, but it’s blissfully mindless, too.

For hours, he cleans up spills and splintered wood and broken glass and the cracked open shell of what used to be their cash register. Relentless as it is, it’s nice to see the place looking at least halfway presentable again, when he’s done. Might take another day or so, but he’s sure they’ll get her back in working condition by midweek.

It’s not until he steps outside and sees that his car isn’t in the parking lot that he remembers he and Nathan drove in together this morning. He debates calling for a ride, but he knows Nathan’s been on a wild goose chase since this morning and, honestly? The long walk home sounds—nice. It’s a little bit cold to be hoofing it, but the quiet? Yeah. Duke would take that any day. Especially after one like this. He needs the time to think.

It seems impossible that, less than twenty-four hours ago, he was drunk and miserable—convinced that he’d never be able to hold on to anything that mattered.

In a single day, he’d told Nathan he loved him (twice), stumbled into something new and exciting, taken a terrible nap, woken up to his restaurant broken into, and found evidence of a potential scheme against him. It’s like Haven decided to cram all the weird bullshit that didn’t happen in the last two years into one, bizarre day.

It’s kind of comforting, actually. Haven doesn’t quite feel like Haven without the strangeness. All this is just back to business as usual, really.

He makes it to the apartment just after sundown, face red from the cold, feeling awake and clear-headed in a way he hasn’t in months. Nathan’s in the kitchen when he walks in.

“Oh, hey. I was just about to see if you needed a ride,” he says, abandoning whatever dinner he was scrounging together to meet Duke at the door. “Jesus, you’re cold.”

“So warm me up,” Duke purrs, dipping into a soft, closed-mouth kiss. It’s still a little surreal, kissing Nathan—indulging an impulse he’s been ignoring for years.

“Smooth,” Nathan teases, easing Duke out of his jacket and abandoning it over the arm of the couch. He reaches up to cradle Duke’s cold face, heating it in his hands. “You find anything about your secret un-admirer?”

“Is this how you flirt? Case talk?” Duke huffs a laugh, nosing closer.

“Kinda.” Nathan grins. He practically shivers when Duke’s hands find his waist.

Duke knows it has nothing to do with the temperature, but he can’t resist, kissing Nathan’s jaw and joking, “My hands really that cold, huh?”

“Really cold,” Nathan agrees, arching up to encourage the touch. Duke lets himself be bold when he tucks his fingers under Nathan’s shirt.

Nathan sucks in a little gasp and dances backwards with a bright laugh. “Oh! Okay, okay, yeah they’re kind of cold.”

God, Duke loves him.

He makes a show of rubbing his hands together and bringing them to his mouth, blowing hot air into the hollow of his hands before dragging Nathan back into his orbit. Pressing a kiss to Nathan’s neck, Duke revels in the way Nathan relaxes into him.

“Now, what were you saying about my ‘un-admirer’?” Duke asks, voice warm with humor.

Linking his hands behind the small of Duke’s back, Nathan says, “I didn’t find much. Your friends sure don’t like cops.”

“Huh. Imagine that.”

“How’s The Gull?” Nathan asks, not at all subtle in the way he drags Duke closer to him until they’re pressed almost flush together. Whatever Nathan’s thinking about, Duke has his doubts that it has anything at all to do with the bar.

“Door locks,” Duke hums in reply. His thoughts aren’t exactly pure either as he runs his newly warm hands up Nathan’s arms. “Floor’s clean. New stock’s on the way. She’s seen better days, but she’ll be fine.”

Nathan’s so close, it’s hard to focus on anything else. The small talk serves as an awfully transparent excuse to linger in this space. Everything feels just a little unreal: yellow-lit and drowsy and unfocused. The last thing Duke wants is to break the spell, but a question’s been nagging at the corner of his mind all day. Persistent. Unbidden.

He doesn’t mean to ask it out loud.

“Do you love me?” The words are out of his mouth, soft and uncertain, before Duke realizes he’s said them. Instantly, he’s slapped with a wave of embarrassment.

“I—what?” Nathan’s confusion probably comes down to surprise more than misunderstanding.

Forcing down the little swell of panic that starts to flood his system, Duke does his best to keep his head together when he says, “Listen, Nate—I’m not trying to rush you or whatever, but—this… isn’t casual for me, okay? I’m in. I am all the way in. In over my head, to be totally honest. And I kinda need you to use your words, here.”

Nathan never said it, is the thing. He kissed Duke like he meant it, but he never said it _back_. Duke thinks he could live with it if Nathan didn’t love him, just yet. But he needs to know where they stand, where Nathan stands, what Nathan wants.

It’s not like Nathan’s ever been good at talking. After all these years, there are a lot of things they don’t _need _to talk about to understand. He knows Nathan better than he knows himself, sometimes. He wants to think he knows the answer to this, too. But he can’t afford to make any assumptions. And maybe—

Maybe he just wants to hear it. Maybe he’s allowed to want that.

Nathan seems to understand the gravity of the question, because he doesn’t blurt out an answer—even if Duke could swear he _sees_ the moment Nathan bites back whatever he was about to say. No, Nathan steps into his space. He cradles Duke’s face in his hands, and his hands are warm and big and calloused. Duke feels the muscles in his shoulders start to relax from the touch alone.

“Duke Crocker,” Nathan says, his words colored by a smug little grin that he can’t seem to keep off his face despite his best efforts. “You are the most infuriating, impossible son of a bitch I have ever met.”

“Thanks,” Duke interrupts with a nervous grin. He feels like he’s vibrating—thrumming with some giddy anxiety that somehow, all at once, is the best and worst thing he’s ever felt.

Nathan rolls his eyes, but the smile he’s been holding back blooms across his face and it’s so gorgeous, Duke forgets how to breathe for a second.

“_And_,” Nathan pushes, refusing to let go of his point. “I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t in love with you, you ass.”

“Oh,” Duke says softly—a little gobsmacked, a little overwhelmed. It’s more intimate than the answer he was expecting—even the good answer. “That’s, uh—that’s—that’s good.”

“Oh, is it?” Nathan teases, his tone caught between exasperated and adoring. “Is it ‘_good’_?”

Duke feels his face go a little hot and looks away, grinning in spite of himself. “Shut up, I’m processing,” he laughs.

Nathan’s arms wind around his neck, shortening the already miniscule distance between them. “Process over here,” Nathan murmurs, tipping into a kiss that leaves Duke reeling. Maybe it’s lucky that they didn’t get their shit together until after the troubles were over, because if Duke was the only one who could feel a kiss like that, he doesn’t know what he’d do.

Nathan sounds like he’s having an awfully similar thought, given the way he holds Duke tighter and moans softly into his mouth.

Everything else that’s happened today—the hangover, The Gull, the mystery surrounding it—it all melts into nothing. Nothing matters aside from the man standing in front of him, kissing him like it’s the easiest thing in the world, like he could really still want Duke after all these years.

It’s impossible and it’s true and the beauty of that burns hot and bright in Duke’s chest. He breaks the kiss just to _look_ at Nathan. Not like he hasn’t been looking for years, but it’s different now that he’s allowed. Now that he doesn’t have to be coy about the way Nathan makes him feel.

“You got so fucking _big_,” Duke laughs, running his hands appreciatively up Nathan’s hips, his sides, his ribs. Nathan was always tall, but the kid Duke fell in love with the first go around was rail thin and gangly, all legs. (He’s still all legs.)

Nathan’s hands find Duke’s narrow waist. There aren’t a lot of things that make him feel particularly small, but the way Nathan’s hands span so much of him sure fits the bill.

“You didn’t,” Nathan teases back. He’s smiling so wide; it turns their kiss clumsy and unfocused.

“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment,” Duke jokes, if only to keep himself from getting swallowed up by the dizzying heat of it all.

“You ever looked in a mirror?” Nathan asks. “I could call you a goddamn poodle and it’d still be a compliment.”

Duke makes an exasperated expression, but he doesn’t stop kissing Nathan long enough for it to stick. “You know, weirdly enough, _that_ doesn’t feel like a compliment, either,” Duke says, laughing—all bright and breathless, arching towards Nathan’s body against his, stumbling through the living room and towards the stairs.

It’s a miracle they make it up the stairs at all. They can’t keep their hands off each other. Nathan keeps turning around to kiss him and Duke has to grip the wall and the handrail to keep them both from tumbling back down.

Nathan’s room is closer, and they’re all hands as Duke leads them that direction. Nathan kisses like he’s starving for it—doesn’t slow down when he tugs Duke’s belt free and drops it to the floor with a soft clink from the buckle.

“Easy, Nate,” Duke murmurs, somewhere between teasing and soothing. Whatever it is, it works, because Nathan slows down enough to pant against his mouth and makes the most gorgeous, strung-out noise Duke’s ever heard.

“Please,” Nathan sighs. The dazed, flushed look on his face makes Duke wonder if even Nathan himself knows exactly what it is he’s asking for. It doesn’t matter. Duke would give him anything. Everything.

Nathan’s so eager he’s almost unhelpful when Duke starts stripping him out of his jeans. He rushes to step out of them, nearly losing his footing. Huffing a small laugh, Duke saves them both from potential disaster and pushes Nathan backwards onto the mattress.

He looks good like that: breathless on his back, wearing nothing but a button down and boxers, looking up at Duke like a flower to the sun.

It’s as though all the air in the room disappears all at once.

Duke remembers coming back from ten years spent traveling the globe and finding a Nathan who looked worlds away from the boy he left behind—flat chested, strong jawed, still thin but broad in the shoulders in a new way. What Duke noticed more than anything, though—more than Nathan’s body or his voice or the way his clothes hung on him—was the sense of calm. Some disquiet that Duke once thought was just a part of who Nathan was had finally been laid to rest, replaced with a kind of peace. Duke remembers thinking it was beautiful. He still does.

Duke hurries to step out of his own jeans, crawling onto the bed.

There’s a bashfulness underneath it all. Duke’s seen him naked before, but not in a lot of years. Not in this version of his body. Nathan looks caught somewhere between nervous and proud, unable to sit still.

“I look different,” he mumbles, voice colored by a smile.

“Yeah?” Duke teases. He dips in to kiss Nathan’s throat, undoing the row of buttons as he goes. “Lemme see.”

Nathan laughs, arching up into the touch—chasing it, chasing Duke. He sits up and lets the shirt fall off his arms, puddled on the bed behind him. He’s all muscle and soft skin: a pair of faded, pale scars running across his chest, a trail of dark hair leading to his waistband. Duke wants to put his mouth everywhere.

He pushes Nathan onto his back again, kissing almost feverishly down his chest while Nathan laughs and squirms and bucks.

“No, c’mon,” Nathan gasps, all giggles and bright delight. He tugs on Duke’s hair and Duke feels that familiar, unfocused heat flood through him again—starting at the base of his skull and arcing down his spine. “Your turn.”

Duke sits up on his knees. He winks—silly and over-the-top—just to hear Nathan dissolve into laughter all over again. Then he peels out of his shirt.

“Oh,” Nathan sighs, as if he’s never seen Duke shirtless before. He runs a hand up Duke’s stomach to his chest. Casting Duke a shy grin, he murmurs, “You’re prettier than I remember.”

Heat creeps up Duke’s neck and he tries to cover it with a laugh. “What, like I wasn’t pretty before?”

Nathan doesn’t rise to the joke. His hands wander Duke’s chest, his narrow waist. “Yeah, but look at you.”

“Look at me?” Duke echoes in soft disbelief. His voice goes quiet and awed, the momentum of the moment suddenly slowed to something careful. Intimate, but in a different way. “Look at _you_.”

Nathan guides him back down into a kiss, sighing into his mouth. His legs wind around Duke’s waist, and Duke makes a thin, breathless moan when their hips press together—nothing but cotton between them.

Dukes hands find Nathan’s thighs, pushing them open and up so he can fit between them. Nathan rocks mindlessly upward, chasing the promise of touch.

Duke doesn’t _have_ to be a tease, but he sure likes to be.

He snaps the waistband of Nathan’s boxers against his stomach, delighted by the shocked gasp of a groan in draws out of Nathan. Mouth trailing the cradle of his hips, Duke sinks lower to kiss him through the cotton.

“Duke,” Nathan sighs. He lifts his hips. “How much longer’re you gonna make me wait?”

Duke’s thoughts scatter to this morning—Nathan pink and breathless, disappearing to get himself off in the shower. He moans and concedes that even his own patience has a twenty-year limit. Sitting back on his haunches, he tugs Nathan out of his boxers and abandons them on the floor beside the bed.

Nathan’s gorgeous. It’s nothing new, but having him like this—completely naked in front of him for the first time in years—rings Duke’s heart like a bell.

“You just gonna look?” Nathan all but whispers. He’s embarrassed, maybe, but in a way that’s hot and pleased and more than a little smug.

Duke settles back between his legs, pressing open-mouthed kisses to the seam of his thigh. Nathan gives the softest little gasp, his hips canting down towards Duke’s mouth, even when it’s just to the left of where Nathan really wants it.

“Fuck, you really did get big,” Duke groans before wrapping his mouth around Nathan’s clit. Nathan makes a shocked noise, yanking hard on Duke’s hair. Duke grinds against the mattress as he eases two fingers inside of Nathan. He’d do this for hours, if Nathan let him. His own arousal comes a distant second to the thrill of Nathan rocking onto his fingers. Looking up through his lashes, he finds Nathan open mouthed and flushed, watching Duke like he can’t bear to look away.

Nathan makes a ruined noise when Duke’s eyes meet his, thighs pressing tight around Duke’s head like he’s trying to draw his knees together, stuck with nowhere to go. “You can’t fucking look at me like that,” Nathan pants, his moan melting into a breathy laugh.

Duke’s too busy dragging his tongue along the hard line of Nathan’s clit, but he makes it a point not to look away. Nathan pulls helplessly on his hair and Duke moans against him. He surrenders, eyes fluttering closed when another hard tug on his hair shuts off every thought in his skull.

He crooks his fingers inside of Nathan, luxuriating in the low whine it earns him. Nathan’s sensitive. Every little press of tongue, every inch of Duke’s fingers lights him up like a livewire.

Nathan’s hand in his hair goes from idle tugging to something more focused, dragging Duke off him and up. Duke can only imagine the fucked out, dazed look on his own face as he lifts up on his elbows.

Licking his lips, he breaks into a lazy smile when he murmurs, “I wasn’t done.”

Nathan groans, squirming underneath him. “I wanna touch you.”

Duke can’t resist rubbing his thumb along Nathan’s clit before finally sitting up and slipping out of his boxer briefs. It would be dramatic to say he makes a show of it, but if he maybe takes a little extra time when he sees the intensity with which Nathan’s watching him? Yeah, alright. He’ll admit to that.

Nathan’s hands are on him before he’s even found his balance again, dragging him down into another kiss while he reaches between their bodies to squeeze Duke’s cock. It’s only then that Duke realizes he’s gone this whole time untouched, suddenly desperate for it when he rocks eagerly into Nathan’s fist. There’s a slick sound as Nathan spreads precome down the shaft.

Nathan stutters into a moan. “Jesus Christ, Duke, you’re—”

“Yeah,” Duke groans on a laugh, quick to shut Nathan up with another kiss. “I know.”

Covering Nathan’s throat in open mouthed kisses, Duke grinds downward for more friction. It earns him a tighter grip around his cock and an absolutely devastated sound from Nathan. Cradling the back of Nathan’s head, he’s mindless with want when he sighs, “Wanna be inside you,” up against the corner of his jaw. When his brain catches up with his mouth, he stutters to a stop, pulling back enough to look at Nathan when he bumbles, “I mean—if you—if that’s what you want.” He grins, dipping down to nuzzle Nathan’s jaw. “I’m up for anything, honestly.”

Nathan laughs—a breathless and airy thing. Legs wrapped around Duke’s waist, he cants his hips up and groans, “Yeah. Yes. Definitely. Just—uh, probably need—um. Lube. Sorry.”

Duke doesn’t have to be a mind reader to sense the sudden anxiety from Nathan. It’s subtle, but Duke’s known him enough years that he could sense it a mile away. Duke matches it with utter calm, voice light when he jokes, “You only gotta apologize if you’re about to tell me I have to run to the store and buy some.”

Nathan startles himself with a laugh, the tension draining out of his shoulders. “You’d still go, though,” he teases.

“With you waiting like this at home? Damn right I would.” Duke kisses the side of his neck, grinding against his hip. “I’d complain the whole time, though.”

“I got it,” Nathan assures him, leaning over to pull a bottle of lube and condom from the bedside table. As he passes them to Duke, he goes a little pink—or pinker than he already is. “Just, uh—go easy on me, okay?” He murmurs.

Duke kisses him—slow and open and adoring. He sighs Nathan’s name against his mouth, one hand splayed out on Nathan’s chest, over his heart. Any nervousness Nathan might have been feeling melts under the touch. He goes pliant and warm, arching closer. Duke senses the shift immediately.

After twenty years, he’d expect there to be a sense of urgency. A need to rush, to make up for lost time. But all Duke feels, as he fits their bodies together, is a sense of belonging—this feeling that he’s in exactly the right place at exactly the right time for maybe the first time in his entire life.

His mouth falls open on a quiet gasp as he eases inside. Nathan pants a thin _oh_ and winds his arms around Duke’s neck.

“I’ve got you,” Duke promises. He presses a trail of kisses up Nathan’s neck, along the curve of his jaw to his mouth. Nathan breaks the kiss on a whine when Duke sinks the last few inches inside of him.

Nathan doesn’t speak. Instead, he pushes a hand into Duke’s hair and moves in shallow, needy rolls of his hips—as if it were possible to take him any deeper.

Letting out a low moan, Duke moves until they build a rhythm together: slow, long strokes that leave them both gasping. Nathan looks at him and Duke can’t remember the last time he felt so seen. It’s all at once overwhelming and mesmerizing. He can’t turn away, but it almost aches to look. Nathan saves him from having to decide by tugging him close, until his nose is buried in the crook of Nathan’s neck.

He reaches between them and circles his fingers around Nathan’s clit, awed by the way it makes him twitch and gasp and groan Duke’s name. Nathan tugs lightly on his hair, and Duke shivers, tipping into the pull to groan, “Harder.”

“Hey,” Nathan pants, voice colored with a smile, “That’s my line.”

Duke laughs, but the sound dips into a moan when Nathan pulls the way he wants him to. Pushing underneath him, Duke wraps his arms around Nathan’s waist and buries his face in his chest as he picks up the pace. Everything builds on top of itself. What was slow and unhurried snowballs into something desperate. He can’t think beyond the sound of Nathan moaning his name, the soft give of his body, the heat. He can’t even string a sentence together. When he whines and loses his pace, hips starting to stutter in their rhythm as he edges towards the brink, it’s like Nathan already knows.

“Please,” Nathan sighs, holding him tighter—arms and legs wrapped around him. “Duke, please.”

Duke breaks like a wave. He grips Nathan’s waist, grinding in and in and in, chasing the heat of him as he comes. It’s quiet—all breath and gasp. He can’t even find the air to moan until it’s already over, groaning against Nathan’s skin as he shivers through aftershocks.

“Fuck,” he sighs. His arms shake under his weight when he props himself up. Nathan’s still electric with want, rolling his hips, trembling at the slightest shift of Duke inside him. It’s almost too much, but Duke wouldn’t dream of pulling out now. He wants to feel it.

Reaching between them, he massages the underside of Nathan’s clit with his thumb. Nathan squeezes Duke’s hips between his thighs, body arcing up like lightning to a lamppost.

When he finally comes, his body bears down around Duke’s cock and Duke almost moans louder than he does. He’s beautiful. Duke couldn’t look away even if he wanted to. He keeps stroking Nathan lazily—watching him twitch and shudder and gasp—until Nathan finally reaches down to grip his wrist with a pitiful groan.

“Mercy,” Nathan laughs, sounding as fucked out and dazed as Duke feels.

Cradling Nathan’s face in his hands, Duke kisses Nathan like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do. And that’s the incredible part—the fact that it isn’t. The fact that he can wake up tomorrow and Nathan will still be there. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a fluke.

“That was better than I remembered,” Nathan murmurs, voice bright with a smile.

Duke barks a startled laugh and tugs playfully on Nathan’s hair. “Uh, yeah, I fucking hope so.”

Nathan tumbles into a laugh of his own. Flushed and half-focused, he looks so gorgeous Duke could swear it makes his heart stop. Just for a second.

Duke only pulls away long enough to drop the condom in the bin. He barely has time to lay down beside Nathan before Nathan’s pressed up behind him, an arm around his waist, nose against the back of his neck.

“I love you,” he whispers against Duke’s skin, and Duke shivers.

“That’s the orgasm talking,” he jokes, but Nathan just holds him tighter.

“It’s not,” Nathan murmurs.

Duke’s heart nearly stutters right out of his chest. Throat gone tight, he laces their fingers together when he mumbles. “Yeah. I love you, too.”

They stay like that all night. Nathan snores, it turns out, but somehow in spite of that, it’s still the best sleep Duke’s had in ages.

* * *

Duke doesn’t reach out to Adrian right away.

The fact that Adrian agrees to meet with Duke at all feels like a goddamn miracle. And maybe that’s not fair. Adrian was, after all, as gentle and tactful and kind as someone in that situation could possibly be. Kinder, honestly, than most people would have been.

But the kindness is exactly what makes Duke worry. It’s too easy. Too generous. Adrian can’t possibly be this at peace about the whole thing. He can’t possibly be so calm as he’s pretending to be. He has to be either tamping down on some big, just-beneath-the-surface fury, or—

Or he let Duke go a long time ago—a long time before he said anything about it. And it’s not anger hiding just beneath the surface, but resignation. Acceptance. Either Adrian hates Duke and won’t admit it, or he gave up on him. And the break-up wasn’t the real end of the relationship, it was just the final push out the door.

Somehow, both options hurt the same.

Duke is finally, after twenty years, getting somewhere with Nathan. The euphoria of that, the honeymoon phase of it—it’s bright and it’s huge, and it leaves Duke smiling at nothing like an idiot. Has him acting like some lovestruck kid.

(In his defense, he is—in a way. Been a lovestruck kid over Nathan since they _were_ kids, first falling in love.)

But even with all of that joy and ease and light, there’s no drowning out the ache: ache over losing someone who mattered, over hurting a person he cared about, over not being able to love Adrian the way he needed—the way he deserved.

Duke’s got his reasons for never quite falling for Adrian, and Nathan isn’t the only one.

Duke’s not a long-term relationship kind of guy.

(He always wanted to be. Always liked the idea of it. But he’s not the kind of boy you bring home to meet the parents. Duke remembers one of the first girlfriends he ever had—or, well, he thought she was his girlfriend. Or was going to be. He, clearly, had misunderstood the—terms of their agreement, because when he slung his legs over the side of her bed and asked if she wanted to grab dinner sometime, she laughed. It wasn’t even a mean laugh, was the worst part. It was genuine—sunny and unbothered, like he’d told the funniest joke in the world.

“Oh, c’mon. You don’t wanna _date _me.”

People did that a lot. Told him what he wanted.

“You’re a lot of fun, Duke,” she continued, pulling a shirt over her head. “Let’s keep it that way.”)

Duke’s good for casual. He’s good for friends with benefits. He’s good for fiery, whirlwind romances that run hot but burn out fast and ugly. Anytime he’s tried for something different, it’s blown up in his face. Nathan. Evi. Audrey.

Maybe Duke should have seen the writing on the wall ages ago and let Adrian down when it would have been kinder. Trouble was, Duke couldn’t see that particular red flag, himself.

Adrian was never earthshaking or electric the way Duke was used to. But Duke’s gone down with enough ships to know that the “spark” isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Adrian felt good and he felt safe and Duke thought that maybe—maybe that’s what real relationships were supposed to be. Maybe that’s what they look like. Maybe love is a quieter, more contented thing.

He still isn’t entirely sure he’s wrong, in theory.

The problem is that Adrian was comfortable, but unfulfilling. Easy, but in the wrong way.

Nathan said once that Duke had _settled_.

He was trying to be cruel about Adrian, but the real truth of the matter is that the problem was Duke, himself. Adrian was funny, he was understanding, he was great with Jean despite her attempts to make him into public enemy number one. He listened to Duke and cared about him. But Adrian wanted Duke. And Duke just—wanted to be wanted. More than anything.

So, he did settle. He settled for being loved instead of loving back.

There’s no way of framing it that doesn’t send a spike of guilt through him. Adrian was good. Good to him. Good for him. But despite almost a year of trying, Duke never stopped comparing him to Nathan.

They go out for coffee. It’s public; it’s neutral ground; Duke can’t order a beer there. But no amount of social niceties could undercut the current of discomfort that runs beneath them. They sit across from each other, suddenly strangers.

“I owe you an apology,” Duke manages, finally. He had it all planned out: everything he wanted to say, exactly how he wanted to say it. But with Adrian seated in front of him, the script evaporates from his brain and he’s left rebuilding it from scratch.

“It’s a start,” Adrian replies—a joke, but one with an edge to it. And that’s fair, in the end. It’s probably gentler than Duke deserves.

Duke figures there’s no way he’s going to get this right. He might as well quit putting off getting it wrong. “You were really good to me,” he murmurs, fiddling absently with the lid of his coffee cup, “and I phoned it in. You deserved better than that.”

“Yeah,” Adrian says simply. He looks away, down at the tabletop, as if he could hide the wounded lilt to his voice.

Duke’s gotten enough non-apologies in his life to know that the words themselves matter, even if they’re just words in the end. “I’m sorry,” he offers. It feels horribly insufficient, given the scope of what’s gone on between them. Clumsy, too—because Duke didn’t exactly do anything wrong, he just didn’t do it right, either. “I know I hurt you. Didn’t mean to, but—fat lot of good that does you, right?”

Adrian huffs a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. He pivots to a new thought, rather than accepting the apology. “Word really does travel fast in this town, you know that?”

Duke isn’t sure he likes where this is going.

“All those little old ladies up at Rosemary’s seem to think you and Nathan are, uh. Cozy.”

The way gossip moves around Haven continues to be one of its absolute worst qualities, even counting the troubles. It figures that there’s already talk.

“Don’t they have anything better to talk about?” Duke groans, picking at the foam lip of his coffee cup.

Adrian keeps his tone passive, even if his posture is anything but, when he asks, “They right?”

Duke sighs. He can’t lie about this. He doesn’t _want_ to. Not really. But no amount of rationalizing makes him feel any less like an asshole when he has to own up to just how quickly he moved on. “We’re—we’re figuring it out. It’s… new.”

It isn’t quick, in the long run. It’s a thirty-year mess that they’re only just now sorting through. But Adrian broke up with him hardly more than a week ago, and that’s still true, too.

“Got it,” Adrian mumbles, looking away.

“I don’t know what to say,” Duke confesses. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked Adrian to meet, like this. Maybe it’s too soon.

Adrian pins him with a look that he can’t read. His voice comes out pinched when he says, “If you’re looking for my blessing, I don’t know if I can give you that, Duke. It—it fucking sucks. You told me you two were over, and I believed you. And I feel like an idiot.”

Something a little cracked and desperate rises to the surface when Duke urges, “I thought it _was_.”

He pauses—reconsiders, because that isn’t strictly speaking true, and he owes Adrian the truth, right now. “Or—I thought—I didn’t think it would get any better, you know? I thought I was just… always gonna feel like that. Carry it.”

Nathan was there for him when nobody else was. He _saw_ Duke. Believed in him. Saw something good in him back when everyone else just saw a lost cause. How was Duke ever supposed to let that go?

Adrian sighs in frustration. He sets down his coffee, making an effort to look Duke in the eyes when he says, “You know, I could have lived with you being in love with Nathan. It was—fuck. It was—after all that shit with him, you didn’t think he even wanted you and you _still_ wanted him more than me. I never asked you to let him go, Duke. I just asked you to give a shit.”

Duke wonders if this conversation would be easier or harder if Nathan didn’t love him back. Would it be simpler to apologize when he hadn’t fallen straight into Nathan’s arms the moment he was allowed to? Or would the shame of it—of desperately loving a man who didn’t want him—color everything red?

Duke stares down at his cup, his throat tight.

“You’re right,” he says, voice quiet.

“I gave you so many goddamn chances,” Adrian pushes, his voice breaking. He stops himself, though—remembers where they are and reigns it in. A couple patrons, two tables over, cast them a sideways glance before going back to their conversation. Duke feels like a coward for doing this in a place where Adrian can’t get angry the way he deserves, but there’s no changing it now.

“I know you did,” Duke murmurs. He runs a hand over his face. “I should have been honest with you.”

“I knew a long time ago,” Adrian says. He settles back in his seat, taking a breath and staring up at the ceiling while he collects his thoughts. He manages a wistful little smile when he looks back at Duke, even if there’s a lot of hurt pinned up behind it. “Guess I just kept hoping you’d figure it out.”

Duke matches him with a sad smile of his own, cautious when he jokes, “You know me. World’s most stubborn asshole.”

Adrian laughs—thin and short, but a laugh. “Yeah, no kidding.” He agrees.

They sit in uncomfortable quiet for a few moments.

“I was gonna tell you off, you know that?” Adrian says, an air of humor creeping into his voice. “You asked to meet up and I had it all planned out. I was gonna—cause a scene. Really let you have it. Maybe pour my coffee in your lap. Just to really put a button on it.”

“I earned it,” Duke laughs. By now, the entire rim of his cup is ragged and picked apart and a small pile of Styrofoam sits beside it on the table. “Why didn’t you?”

Adrian only looks at him, at first. When he does answer, it’s so simple and quiet and honest. It cleaves straight through Duke’s ribs to his heart.

“I love you.”

Guilt spikes through him like a physical thing, but nothing about Adrian’s tone or posture makes it seem like he meant the words as a weapon. He just meant them. Duke should say something. He knows that. But when he opens his mouth, his voice gives out underneath him.

Adrian waits. Or maybe he isn’t waiting at all. Maybe he just lets the words settle. Maybe he doesn’t have anything left to say.

Duke surprises them both when he manages a soft, “Thank you.” Anxiety simmers to a boil inside of him, but he keeps it as tamped down as he can—only seeping through in the patter of his fingers tapping on the table. “For, uh—for everything, honestly. I know I didn’t—I couldn’t—I wasn’t what you wanted. Or what you deserved. But this, us—it meant a lot to me.” Just when he thinks he’s got a lid on everything, he goes and gets choked up right at the end. Turning his head to the side, he blinks away the sudden, sharp threat of tears.

Adrian sits with his arms crossed over his chest, staring down at the table. He nods, mouth pressed in a tight line. Quiet stretches between them, broken only by a sniff as Adrian struggles to keep himself together. Duke tries to push down the hurt that fills his chest, but there’s nowhere for it to go. He thinks, maybe, he’ll just have to sit with it for a while. He owes Adrian that much.

“I need some space,” Adrian admits finally. “But I really hope this works out for you, Duke.”

Throat going tight, he does his best to flash a smile Adrian’s way. “You’re too nice to me, you know that?” Duke jokes, except it isn’t entirely a joke.

Adrian manages a grin, too. “Yeah. I know.”

It aches. But Duke thinks, maybe, it aches in the way it’s supposed to.

He wasn’t in love with Adrian, but he’s going to miss him.

* * *

Leaving town in the middle of an investigation might not be the best strategy, but Duke talks Nathan into it anyway. After all, the thief hung around town for months and now he’s got at least part of what he came for. He’s either a million miles away already, or he’s not leaving any time soon.

Either way, they could use a weekend off. He books them a round trip to Nebraska, and Nathan’s grumbling about abandoning the case disappears pretty quick at the thought of getting to see Jean.

Richard is outside when they get there, knelt in the garden with a pair of dull yellow gloves on, making space for a new row of brightly colored flowers. He gets to his feet as they step out of the car, brushing the soil from his hands.

He pulls each of them into a warm, crushing hug. “Well, aren’t you boys a sight for sore eyes,” he chuckles, patting Nathan on the back.

“Been too long,” Nathan says, a little bashful.

“Damn right, it has!” Richard laughs. “But I’m not the one you need to apologize to.” He nods to the door. “The little munchkin’s inside. She hasn’t shut up about you two all day.” He pushes them both in the direction of the house. “Don’t keep her waiting.”

They barely have the door open before Jean’s voice rings down the hallway.

“PAPA!” She shouts, barreling toward the door at full speed.

Nathan hardly has time to kneel down before Jean jumps into his arms, nearly bowling him over entirely.

“Hey, hey!” Nathan laughs, scooping her up. She cheers as the floor disappears underneath her and he balances her on his hip. “How’d you get this big so fast?” He asks, leaning back to look at her in his arms. “I haven’t been gone that long, have I?”

“You were gone forever!” Jean declares dramatically as she rests her head on his shoulder.

“Sorry, kiddo,” Nathan murmurs, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “Won’t happen again, I promise.”

“Do I get a hello?” Duke teases, reaching out to ruffle her hair.

“No!” Jean yells with a bright giggle. “Only Papa!”

Nathan grins at him. “I’m her favorite.”

Duke rolls his eyes, but the smile on his face goes so wide it almost hurts. “Figures.”

“So, what’d I miss, Jeanbean?” Nathan carries her into the living room so he can sit down. She settles happily in his lap. Duke sits down beside them and tries not to get too choked up when the word _family_ crosses his mind, unbidden.

“I got in trouble!” She tells them, entirely too proud.

Duke’s eyebrows lift. “A criminal already, huh?”

Eliza rounds the corner with a chuckle. She leans against the doorway, watching them with a fond expression. “She had a school project about parents,” she explains. “When she said her dad was a pirate, her teacher thought she’d misunderstood the assignment.”

Nathan drops into papa bear mode so fast, Duke nearly chokes on his own laugh. “What teacher? I’ll talk to them _right now_.”

Eliza laughs too. “I cleared it up, don’t worry.”

Expression still suspicious, Nathan concedes with a petulant, “Fine.”

Duke gently tugs on a lock of Jean’s hair when he says, “You know I own a restaurant, right?”

She turns in Nathan’s lap to look at him, expression unimpressed when she informs him, “That’s boring.”

Duke chuckles. “It is kinda boring.” He glances at Nathan and makes a face. “Oh god, am I _boring_ now?”

Nathan beams. “So boring. Downright domestic.”

“Ugh,” Duke groans, a soft smile still lingering in the creases around his eyes.

Duke never had a father, not really. Not in a way that mattered. Not in a way that was good. But Jean holds his fingers in her hand and he’s finally able to believe that maybe he might be able to be one. A good one.

After all, she’s his. And she’s perfect. And he couldn’t love her more if he tried.

Maybe he _was_ meant to have a family.

Maybe he got this right.

* * *

Back in Haven, Duke has given up his role as the consummate morning person to get a little extra time in bed. Of course, the bed in question includes a ruffled, clingy, half-asleep Nathan Wuornos who won’t untangle from around his waist, so really his hands are tied.

When his phone goes off, he almost, almost ignores it. Nothing in the world could possibly matter more than the newly irritated, barely awake idiot grumbling against his chest about how his phone is too loud.

Reaching over to the bedside table, he’s about to end the call when he sees the name on the screen.

Dwight? At seven in the morning? Alright. He’s intrigued.

“Hey, Duke,” Dwight’s voice comes through a little muffled, broken up the crackle of the sea breeze hitting the microphone.

Nathan grumbles an unhappy, “whudduz he want?_”_ against Duke’s collar, but accepts Duke scratching his head as appropriate appeasement.

“Squatch,” Duke chimes, only slightly distracted by the sleep monster burrowing against his neck. “I take it you’re not just calling to wish me good morning.”

“This might be, uh, overstepping a boundary somewhere, but—you planning on having visitors, this time of day?”

Duke stretches, sighing when his back pops in three different places. He grins big enough that Dwight can probably hear it in his voice. “You know, if you wanna come over for breakfast, you can just ask, big guy.”

Dwight chuckles softly. “Raincheck me on that, wouldja?” He says, before his tone drops into something more serious and he continues, “No, I mean on the Rouge. There’s a woman prowling around deck. Sure doesn’t look like she was invited.”

Now that’s weird.

Duke sits up, despite Nathan’s foggy protests. “What’s she look like?”

“Uh, big. Like, she might be able to bench press _me_. Dark hair. Denim jacket.”

Duke could be wrong—he hopes he’s wrong—but he sure thinks he knows who that is.

No reason to panic, right? She’s got the client list. She’s probably on the Rouge looking for more of the same. She’s been in town for god knows how many months, and hasn’t gone looking for him, specifically, yet. Why start now?

He is probably, maybe, most likely not in imminent danger. Probably.

He stumbles out of bed, cellphone pressed between his ear and his shoulder as he hops into a pair of jeans. “Can you stall her?”

“No promises, but I’ll try,” Dwight offers. “You should hurry, though.”

“On our way.” He tosses the phone on the bed before rifling through the closet for something warm.

Nathan sits up, looking confused but more alert now that he’s realized something is wrong. “What’s going on?” He asks as Duke pulls a sweater over his head.

Duke doesn’t slow down. His heart thunders behind his ribs. Despite his unrattled outward demeanor, he feels like he’s been hooked up to a car battery.

“Somebody’s breaking into my boat,” Duke says. He tosses Nathan a shirt. “And I don’t think she’s gonna be happy to see me.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe it's finally over. Five months of working on this fic. That's absolutely wild. Thank you so, so much to everyone who stuck through it with me. I hope you've had even half as much fun reading it as I've had writing it. This work means so much to me, and I'm honestly a little heartbroken it's over. I took a little extra time putting this last chapter together, because I wanted to make sure I got everything exactly right. I hope I have. Thank you so much for going on this adventure with me.

Nathan really, really hates mornings.

Even a good morning’s got nothing on an alright afternoon. And it was supposed to be a good morning. He and Duke were supposed to stay curled up in bed for another few hours, until Duke inevitably got antsy—because Duke, for some incomprehensible reason, _likes_ mornings—and decided to get up and make breakfast. There would have been coffee. Eggs. Maybe a few stolen kisses.

Instead, Nathan rolled out of bed half-awake and shrugged into a sweater he was pretty certain wasn’t his, to head off towards a problem he doesn’t even know the name of. All because Duke’s criminal friend couldn’t do her breaking in in the middle of the night like a normal felon.

Duke spends the drive in an eerie quiet. Nathan’s too busy convincing the gears in his own brain to start turning to notice, at first. But the longer it goes, the more uncomfortable it feels. Duke never _stops_ talking. It’s not that he chatters so much as always finds simple ways to fill the quiet. Has since they were kids. Even when they were furious at each other, Duke would rather smart-remark his way into an argument than sit in silence.

Nathan wants to allow Duke his thoughts, whatever they may be (and however Nathan may feel about not being privy to them). But he needs to know what they’re dealing with. Who they’re dealing with. He has his service weapon if things go sideways, but given the kinds of people Duke’s known to work with, well—he doubts it’ll be her first time staring down the barrel of a gun.

Sure would be nice to know how worried he should be.

“You know who it is?” Nathan asks, as the blue edge of the ocean pulls into sight.

“Hope not,” Duke answers, tight lipped and distant—clearly aiming for humor, but coming up just short of it. Nathan doesn’t like it. Duke meets danger with defiance; the white-knuckled quiet unsettles him.

“You said she wasn’t gonna be happy to see you,” Nathan prompts in an attempt to get some kind of familiar reaction. He keeps waiting for Duke to shrug it off, flash him a thousand-watt grin, go sauntering into danger.

Duke parks at a bait shop a few blocks down from where he’s docked the Rouge. “If she’s who I think she is,” he murmurs, sounding distracted, “then no, she isn’t.”

Nathan taps his fingers in sequence along the dashboard. It’s an old habit, from before the barn. He couldn’t feel fidgets, but he could hear them. Tapping, clicking, drumming—it all reminded him that he was real, a physical presence, that the world felt him even when he couldn’t feel it back. Even now, there’s a sort of comfort in it. He trusts the sounds more than he trusts his body.

“You scared?” Nathan asks, shooting Duke a sideways glance. It’s the same cocky, loaded question they always used to ask each other when they were teenagers—right before they tumbled into something stupid and probably just shy of legal.

That snaps Duke out of it—whatever ‘it’ is. He cracks into a low, honest chuckle and shoots Nathan a crooked smile. “Yeah,” he drawls, all sarcasm and humor, “Yeah, I’ve seen a woman literally stitch herself a new skin, but it’s the cat burglar that _really_ freaks me out.”

He might be deflecting, but at least he’s a step closer to the Duke he knows.

They wind their way along the docks, carefully avoiding the Rouge’s sightlines in a last-ditch attempt at the element of surprise. Dwight hasn’t checked in since he called Duke the first time, and they have no idea what they’re walking into. So, for the sake of preserving whatever advantage they have, they weave between the buildings and boats with care, even when it makes them look like extras in some low-budget spy thriller.

They spot Dwight a few slips ahead, huddled behind a schooner not far from the Rouge.

“Not a good sign,” Nathan mutters, mostly to himself.

“Maybe they’re playing hide and seek,” Duke jokes.

A woman’s voice—unfamiliar and furious—calls out above the low rush of the waves. “I know you’re out there, you fucker!”

“Yeah,” Nathan drawls, glancing at Duke over his shoulder, “she sounds like she’s having a blast.”

Settling behind a storage shed just across from Dwight’s hiding place, Duke whispers across the gap, “_This_ is stalling her?”

Dwight nods his usual hello, casual as anything, as though kneeling behind a dinky little boat in broad daylight is just par for the course. To be fair, weirder things have been known to happen, in Haven.

“Good news,” Dwight murmurs, sneaking a peek over the edge of the boat before ducking back down. “She’s still here.” He casts Duke a meaningful look as if to say, _See? Stalled._ “Bad news, she’s got a gun.”

“Okay, so?” Duke retorts. “It’s not like you’re a bullet magnet, anymore.” Nathan sees the moment realization dawns on Duke’s face. Unfortunately, it’s about half a second too slow to take the edge off the exasperated expression Dwight shoots his way.

If it were any other—less dire—situation, Nathan would revel in the forcedly cheerful, sick-of-your-bullshit edge to Dwight’s voice when he says, “I’m still made of meat, Duke.”

Duke winces, sucking his teeth with a nod. “Right. Yep. Yeah. You got me.”

As it is, Nathan is infinitely more interested in the woman on the Rouge with the gun than anything else, right now. “A little _focus_, guys?” He whispers.

Nathan reaches for his pistol. It’s better than nothing, but despite their caution, they don’t have the advantage, here. This far down the docks, he doesn’t have an angle on the Rouge—and no way to get one without stepping out of cover and leaving himself exposed. With her already on the lookout for Dwight, there’s no way she won’t be ready to pull the trigger on him.

Bad guys with guns, he realizes with a dark edge of humor, are a hell of a lot scarier when you can actually _feel_ getting shot.

He tries to think. Turning to the others, he says, “I can’t land the shot from here. And if I move, she’s gonna see me.”

“Sounds like what you need is a distraction,” Duke chimes, entirely too cheerful about it.

So, Duke’s got a plan. A bad plan, from the sound of it, but it’s one plan more than anybody else has got—even if he’s wearing one of those grins that only ever seems to mean trouble for Nathan.

Duke looks back and forth between them both. “Alright, everybody be cool. We got history.” Duke’s voice stays hushed and hurried. He might be playing at being relaxed, but Nathan recognizes the taut line of his shoulders for the thinly veiled nervousness that it is. “I can keep her talking long enough for you two to go around back and get the goddamn gun out of her hands. Just. You know. Try and be quick about it, alright? I’ll distract her.”

Nathan, shockingly, doesn’t have much of a problem with that plan. That is, right up until the moment when Duke gets to his feet and sidles right out of cover, hands lifted over his head. Nathan barely catches the hem of Duke’s coat, but not fast enough; it slips right through his fingers.

“Distract her how?” Nathan snarls on a whisper. “Duke—? Duke! _Distract her how_?!”

“Alright, I’m coming out,” Duke calls in the moment before he steps out into the open. “Sure would appreciate it if you didn’t shoot me, yet.”

He’s going to give Nathan a heart attack one of these days.

“Duke Crocker,” the woman snaps, dropping the name like a curse.

Duke moseys his way down the docks, in plain sight, hands raised in surrender, looking awful relaxed for a man in imminent danger. Nathan can’t see the woman currently standing on the deck of the Rouge—not even when he tries to peer out from around cover. The mast blocks most of his view. Duke, however, knows exactly who he’s looking at.

“Morgan Cooper!” He cheers, with all the pleasant ease of reuniting with an old friend. “As I live and breathe!”

Duke’s all easy angles, relaxed shoulders, that thousand-watt smile. But Nathan knows that act for what it is: a bluff. Duke only ever looks so carefully relaxed when he’s anything but.

Duke takes a few more steps into the open but doesn’t wander far. He’s still just within Nathan’s eyeline when he comes to a stop and asks, “Now, what brings you to my sleepy little sea-side town? Can’t imagine anybody’s paying you what you’re worth, moving cod.”

“You’d know all about paying me what I’m worth,” she barks. The open hostility in her tone sets Nathan’s teeth on edge. Duke wants to play at being diplomatic—even if only as a distraction—but Nathan doubts whoever this Morgan person is has any interest in meeting him at the table.

He really, really hopes she’s not as quick with her trigger finger as she is with her mouth.

Duke sucks in a breath through his teeth, conceding with a reluctant tilt of his head. “Alright, that’s fair. I deserved that. And you know what? I’d love to talk to you about it. But I’ve got this weird thing where I just don’t really like having guns pointed at me. You know? So, how ‘bout we put the gun down and talk this through like normal, well adjusted, financially responsible adults, huh?”

“_Duke, what the fuck are you doing_?” Nathan hisses on a whisper when it becomes abundantly clear that Duke’s already paper-thin plan has more holes in it than a fishing net.

Duke glances over his shoulder to cast him a look that, if Nathan had to guess, probably means something along the lines of, _what the fuck does it look like I’m doing?_ And, _hey, jackass, we had a plan so why are you just sitting there?_ Duke’s careful to wipe the frustration off his face entirely before he turns his attention back to where it belongs.

Duke pushes forward with an overly casual, “You’re not trying to kill me, are you Coop? You know, I can make you a lot more money alive than dead.”

“You sure took your time showing your face.” Her voice rings cold and sharp: a less than encouraging sign.

Duke lets out a tight, unfriendly laugh and finally allows his arms to drop out of surrender and back to his sides. “Well now,” he singsongs, like it doesn’t matter at all, like there isn’t a gun pointed at his heart. “You’re the one who showed up to my party uninvited. I think I’m allowed to be a little fashionably late, don’t you?”

She doesn’t seem at all impressed by his sense of humor. If anything, Nathan’s starting to wonder if the stupid jokes might _literally _be shortening Duke’s lifespan.

He has to focus. He has to move. Duke’s counting on him.

Nathan meets Dwight’s eyes from across the walkway. Dwight drops a few military hand signals that Nathan only vaguely understands, and even then, he’s not sure he gets the real nuance of them. A few more modified gestures and some rough attempts at lip reading later, and Nathan’s fairly certain he and Dwight are on the same page.

Dwight has the harder job of having to get _across_ before he can start winding his way down the pier. He’s got the best chance at being spotted, and Nathan knows he’ll have to time things just right to be able to cross that gap at a time where Morgan really _is_ distracted by the suicidal bullshit Duke’s currently pulling.

Nathan takes advantage of his head-start—circling around the back of the shed he’d been posted up behind and following the line of buildings around behind the Rouge. Getting on board the rusty old thing without making some kind of noise is going to prove to be a real problem, and Nathan knows it. Nathan scans the backside of the boat for a spot least likely to screech, clang, creak, or otherwise broadcast his presence.

He closes his hand around the rung of a mostly not rusted out ladder at the exact same moment the first gunshot goes off and Duke’s end of the plan goes all to hell.

Duke never thought he’d see Morgan Cooper again. The two of them ran a handful of jobs together in his early days—back when he moved more… dangerous cargo. He’s always had rules about what he was and wasn’t willing to get involved with. But those kinds of rules got stricter, over time. And it wouldn’t be much of a leap to say that the runs with Cooper were what put a lot of those rules into place.

Cooper was never a friend. In some ways, _nobody_ is ever a friend in that line of work, but sometimes you get amicable enough to at least pretend. He and Cooper never pretended. They were out for a paycheck. They worked together because they each had something the other one needed. Sometimes that something was contacts, a buyer. Sometimes it was a boat, or a connect in port who could help them unload.

They had an extremely compatible pair of skillsets. Their personalities? Not so much. Long hauls usually resulted in a lot of certainly-not-empty threats to throw him overboard and at least one or two instances where he was, genuinely, concerned he’d pushed things too far and she was going to really and actually murder him.

But Duke was never supposed to see Morgan Cooper again.

Because Duke had ruined her life and then fucked off to the farthest corner of the world.

It’s not that he was naïve enough to consider himself untraceable, it’s just that he had every reason to believe she’d never have the resources to actually find him. Not after what he did.

“You’re not an easy man to find, Crocker,” she snarls—her rifle leveled at his chest. It’s not the first time he’s been on the wrong end of a gun, but it never really gets easier. Calm as he keeps his expression, it doesn’t stop the thundering of his heart behind his ribs.

He can talk his way out of this. He can talk his way out of anything.

“Look, I’m not hustling anymore,” he offers, voice placating. He needs her calm, or this is going to go real badly for him. “You want my client list? Keep it. It’s all yours. But it’s not gonna do you a lot of good. You think you can just call them up? Clientele like that? No, you need somebody to put in a good word for you. Hard to do that when I’m dead.”

“Why the fuck would I trust you?” She asks, her voice icy in a way that’s dangerous.

Duke tries for an unaffected grin and lighthearted cheer when he says, “Would you believe I’m a changed man?”

“Honestly, Duke?” She says, and for the briefest of moments he thinks maybe he’s made a little progress. “I don’t give a shit.”

Well. Worth a shot.

“Coop, we can talk about this. I—” Something catches in the corner of his eye. It’s the worst possible time to let himself get distracted, but something pings a confused, panicked memory in the back of his mind and he can’t help but look. Parked not far from the Rouge, a dark grey sedan that looks unbearably familiar.

Duke’s easy demeanor drops like a plate to the floor.

Casting a wide-eyed look up at Cooper, his voice nearly gives out from under him when he babbles a shocked, “You’re the one who hit me.”

Cooper levels the barrel at him, her voice chillingly calm when she says, “I should have backed up and hit you again.”

When the gun goes off, Dwight’s first thought lands as a hollow, bottomless kind of dread. No vest, he thinks. He waits. Milliseconds pass like hours, the whole world caught in the molasses of terror turned resignation. He’s taken bullets before. He knows what to expect. Sometimes, though, he thinks the knowing makes it hurt more, not less.

The impact never comes.

As the ringing in his ears starts to fade, Dwight remembers it’s not coming. Relief is a fleeting thing.

“Duke!” Nathan shouts, giving away his own position. Dwight doesn’t have time to worry where the first shot landed, because Cooper whips around and has her rifle point-blank at Nathan.

“I wondered where your pet cop was,” she sneered. “Drop the gun, pig.”

From where Dwight’s crouched on the other side of the boat, he can just barely see Nathan shake his head, service weapon leveled at Cooper’s head. “You’re outnumbered,” Nathan says.

She’s entirely too smug when she coos a condescending, “You don’t know that.”

“I think I do,” Nathan insists, and if they all make it through this in one piece, Dwight is going to sit him down and have a long, serious conversation about needlessly baiting the bad guy.

“You willing to bet Crocker’s life on it?”

Nathan hesitates. Dwight can see it from where he stands—the indecision that crosses his face. Dwight bites down on a curse. Nathan knows better. He _knows_ it’s just her; he’s letting his worry get in the way. But Dwight can’t do jack shit unless the two of them keep her occupied. He has to move slow: climb his way on deck without making so much as a sound and get close to her without ending up with that gun pointed at him.

A couple years without the troubles and he’s going soft. Guns were a reality for him, not so long ago. Stray bullets were a fact of life that he learned to live with. Now, in the aftermath of all of it, the idea of being on the other end of that barrel scares him a hell of a lot more than it ought to.

They’re running out of time.

“The big one,” she barks, “Where is he?”

Dwight winces with one leg thrown over the railing. All she’d have to do is turn around and he’s made.

Duke, apparently, isn’t down for the count just yet. Out of the corner of his eye, Dwight watches Duke lever himself back to his feet, clutching his arm where a dark patch of blood colors his sweater. His voice comes out pained, but forcefully bright when he chimes, “Come on, Coop, we can talk about this.”

It’s the distraction Dwight needs. Cooper keeps her eyes on Duke and her gun on Nathan when she growls, “Tell your boyfriend to back off, or I’m gonna put a hole in his head.”

Duke’s careful not to let his gaze wander to Dwight for even a second, and Dwight’s immediately grateful for all Duke’s years of running cons.

“I can make you a very rich woman, Cooper,” Duke offers. Dwight doubts Duke is actually bargaining so much as stalling for time, but that’s all he needs. “But I’m not doing shit for you, if you hurt him.”

Cooper doesn’t faulter. “You pissed off a lot of people, Crocker.”

Maybe it’s the pain or maybe even Duke’s easy, devil-may-care attitude has its limits, but he doesn’t sound nearly so glib when he prompts, “So—what? Bounty on my head puts a dent in that debt I left you with, right?”

“Something like that.”

“Listen, I got money,” Duke urges. “And I’d rather be broke than dead. We can work this out, nobody has to get hurt.”

She seems to consider it, but not for nearly long enough. “I think I’m gonna be the one to make that decision. Now, tell him to give me the gun.”

Dwight can’t rush her. He can’t. He makes a sound too soon, she turns around, shoots him, he’s dead. He makes a sound too late, she startles, shoots Nathan, _he’s_ dead. Not to mention the part where all of this goes sideways if she so much as glances over her shoulder. Their only chance is for Duke to keep her talking long enough for Dwight to slowly, slowly, slowly ease close enough to either disarm her or knock her out in one go. They don’t get a second shot at this thing.

But Duke’s starting to get nervous about Nathan. Dwight can hear it in his voice.

Those two lovebirds are going to get all three of them killed.

“Nathan—” Duke breaks, the bottom dropping out of his voice. Dwight forces himself not to hurry, to trust them, even when every cell in his body is trying to tell him this is already over.

From this angle, moving along the deck with as much care and silence as he can muster, he can’t see Nathan. He can see the stillness, though. No one moves. No one hands over a gun. No one shoots.

“Not a fucking chance,” Nathan snarls.

Dwight never thought he’d say this, but god bless Nathan fucking Wuornos.

Duke doesn’t seem to share the sentiment. “Nathan, goddamn it, I’m gonna kill you myself,” he swears under his breath. Although, Dwight wonders just how much of it’s for dramatic effect—to keep up the ruse. Duke’s the only one who can see just how close Dwight is.

“Coop,” Duke urges, desperation creeping into his voice that could have as much to do with Dwight as it does with Nathan. “Coop, listen to me. I’m sorry. I know we weren’t—well, we weren’t exactly friends, but you trusted me—”

“And I fucking shouldn’t have,” she snarls. Dwight only needs a couple more seconds. “You almost got me killed.”

“Hey, now, don’t sell yourself short,” Duke chimes, back to his old self, and Dwight wonders if he’s being purposefully irritating or if he’s just made that way. “The McIntyres loved you. They weren’t gonna do anything to you.”

“They broke my fucking arms.”

Duke winces, recoiling a little. His voice still sounds entirely too bright when he corrects himself to, “They weren’t gonna—do anything, uh… you know. _Fatal_ to you.”

Cooper certainly doesn’t find it funny. “You tanked my career,” she snarls.

Duke makes a face. Dwight’s almost certain, now, that he’s being obnoxious on purpose. Almost. “C’mon, like you wouldn’t have sold me out if you ever had a chance to.”

“Oh, I’m gonna do better than that,” she growls. Dwight can see the muscles in her back go tight, can see the moment where she’s readies herself to move—to turn the gun on Duke, maybe, or swipe Nathan’s legs out from under him. They’ll never know exactly what, because finally, _finally_ Dwight’s close enough.

Everything happens in an instant.

Nathan meets Dwight’s eyes over her shoulder. He lurches forward and shoves Cooper’s arm up in the same moment Dwight yanks her backwards. A gunshot fires harmlessly into the air above Nathan’s head. She barks out a curse, jabbing her elbow back into Dwight’s stomach. It winds him, but not enough to slow him down. Before she can turn the gun back on any of them, Dwight palms the side of her head and shoves it against the metal wall of the cabin with a loud, hollow clang. She crumples heavy to the deck.

“Thank fucking god,” Duke sighs, slumping to the ground like a puppet with cut strings. He grips his bleeding arm, head tipped skyward while he catches his breath. “Fuck, I did not miss being shot at.”

“You and me both,” Dwight huffs, buzzing with leftover adrenaline.

Nathan rolls her over and puts her in cuffs. She makes a muffled noise, skirting the edges of consciousness, before dropping back under.

“You really pissed her off, huh?” Nathan asks as he hops down from the deck. For all his pretend calm, as soon as he’s within reach of Duke, he fusses over the injury—unwilling to let Duke out of his sight until he’s confirmed that it really was a graze and not something more serious.

“Kiss it better?” Duke teases, batting his lashes up at Nathan.

Nathan, now convinced of Duke’s safety, rolls his eyes with an exasperated grin. “You’re the one with the freaky blood thing. I’m not into it.”

Duke barks a startled, offended chuckle. “I hate you.”

“You don’t,” Nathan counters, entirely too fond.

Dwight huffs a little laugh, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you two idiots took so long to get your shit together. You’re embarrassing.”

There’s a moment of quiet before Duke breaks on a snort and the three of them dissolve into breathless laughter. After everything, it’s a relief.

* * *

The day starts long and just gets longer. Cooper stays unconscious _almost_ the whole ride to the station, only to go absolutely goddamn feral just a couple blocks out. Duke’s land rover wasn’t exactly built for moving criminals—well, except for the one behind the steering wheel—and they’re barely able to keep her contained when she starts thrashing in the back seat.

By the time she’s behind bars and their statements have been taken and Nathan’s dragged him to Gloria to confirm he’s definitely in one piece—(“You’re gonna live, kid,” she’d drawled with amusement, examining the shallow cut.)—Duke feels like he could sleep for a week.

As they make their way to their cars, Dwight casts him a glance he’s too tired to try and read.

“Somethin’ on your mind, Squatch?” Duke sighs. Nathan’s still a few paces behind, talking with Gloria.

Duke’s not really listening, but he does catch her irritated, “And why, exactly, did you buncha idiots walk into that fight without backup?” Duke grins. He’s glad he’s not the one getting lectured.

“Cooper was the one who hit you, huh?” Dwight muses.

Duke sucks in a breath, trying not to let himself linger on the stop-motion memories of the crash, or the venom in her voice when she snarled _should have backed up and hit you again_. He can’t really blame her for the fury. He double crossed her: sailed off with a haul they’d gotten together, left her high and dry with the old buyers while he was flush with a better offer. Still, it’s been a while since he faced a danger quite that _personal_. The troubles were a nightmare, but at least most of them weren’t mad at _him_ specifically.

Most of them.

“Yeah,” Duke sighs, trying to roll the tension from his shoulders.

“How come she never tried again?” Dwight asks.

Duke had wondered the same thing—still doesn’t have a sure answer. “Best guess?” He offers, “I’m betting she saw me cozied up to the chief of police and decided I wasn’t worth the trouble.”

Dwight casts him a warm grin. “When are you, ever?” He teases and Duke blurts out a startled laugh. He bumps their shoulders together.

“I got shot at, today. Don’t be a dick.”

Dwight raises his eyebrows, and Duke immediately realizes his mistake. “Oh, you got shot at?” Dwight asks, his voice bright and taunting, “One time? Oof, wow. I can’t even imagine.”

Duke huffs a quiet chuckle, shaking his head. “Yeah, yeah. I get it, I get it. You’re a real hero.” They’re quiet for a second before Duke glances back at him, tone sincere when he adds, “Really. You are. You saved our asses, back there.”

Dwight squeezes his shoulder. “Team effort.” He steps back, digging his keys out of his pocket. “Don’t forget, you still owe me that breakfast.”

“Come by anytime, Squatch,” Duke laughs. “Just, y’know, maybe call first. Had enough people showing up unannounced for one lifetime.”

A few yards behind them, Gloria barks a frustrated, “You really are dumber than a sack of bricks, you know that? The lot of you. Cotton for brains.” She peers over at Duke and Dwight, pointedly raising her voice to shout, “I expected better from you, Dwight!”

Dwight nods and Duke laughs at the genuinely embarrassed look that crosses his face. “Sorry, Gloria.”

“I’m too old to be worrying about you knuckleheads,” she grumbles. “I drop down dead from a heart attack, it’s on your conscience.”

“Now, what could you possibly have to worry about in Haven?” Duke fires back with a lopsided grin. “Happiest place on Earth.”

* * *

Nathan offers to drive. After spending all day riding an adrenaline high, Duke’s grateful for the chance to do nothing, just sit in the passenger’s seat and think—even if there’s something strange about sitting shotgun in his own car. The perspective’s all wrong, like looking at the world through a warped mirror. Distorted.

Maybe he’s more tired than he thought.

Checking his phone for the first time in hours, he startles at the missed call from Eliza. Panic floods in, immediately. Today has already gone so wrong, of course there would be more. Of course, it wasn’t over. He fumbles to call back, not bothering to listen to the message. Jean has to be alright. He can’t take more bad news.

Eliza barely has time to pick up before Duke blurts, “What happened? Is she okay?”

After only a moment of quiet confusion, Eliza promises, “Oh—Duke, she’s fine. She’s fine.” She laughs, the sound crackling across the connection. “Goodness gracious, I know we should call more but it’s not _that_ unusual, is it?”

The tension leaves in one, heavy breath—escaping like pressure from a balloon, less of a pop and more a steady deflation. He manages a laugh of his own, even if it’s a weak one. “Sorry, Liz,” he sighs. “Long day. What’s—uh, what’s up?”

Nathan casts him a concerned glance and he shoots him a thumbs up, mouthing _she’s fine_ before he can go and get worried, too.

“We’ve just been thinking,” Eliza tells him, “Well, it’s just that Richie and I aren’t going to be around forever.” Duke starts to argue that line of thinking—can’t really stomach the idea of mortality after how his morning went, but she stops him in his tracks with a bright, flustered, “Oh, don’t you start, Duke Crocker. It’s the truth. Listen. We’re not talking anything drastic, yet, we just—well, we thought maybe we ought to get the paperwork in order. That way things are easier for you, when the time comes.”

Duke feels speechless, caught between hope and fear and anxiety that doesn’t feel all bad. “Oh,” he murmurs. Distantly, he’s aware of Nathan’s curious sideways glances, but he can’t even begin to explain his reaction when he’s still processing it himself. Everything feels just a little surreal. Like a dream of a dream.

“We also thought maybe you’d want to talk about partial custody.” For all Duke’s worry, Eliza sounds entirely sure—confident in him the way so few people in his life have ever been. It shakes something loose, in his chest. Something fragile. Something forgotten. “She just adores you, Duke. And we love her like our own—we’ll always be a home to her. But she ought to spend more time with her father. Summers, maybe.”

Summers. Whole summers with Jean. Her bright little laugh lighting up the house, getting to take her to see the ocean. A sting starts in the back of his eyes that feels suspiciously close to tears.

“You don’t have to make any decisions right this minute,” Eliza promises, “But we’d like to put those wheels in motion, next time you come visit. Just wanted you to be thinking on it.”

For a second, Duke forgets she’s waiting on an answer. He can’t quite catch his breath—feels lightheaded and giddy. “Thanks, Liz. That sounds—that sounds amazing. We’ll, uh, figure out the details.” He catches himself stuttering just a little when he manages a tight, “Thank you.”

He can’t see her, but he swears he hears the moment she breaks into a smile. “Thanks for making that call, two years ago. I don’t think she knew how much she needed you. Take care, Duke.”

“Yeah—yeah, uh. See you soon.”

Duke finds himself staring down at his phone in his lap, vision swimming.

“Duke,” Nathan urges, unusually gentle. “What’d she say?”

Duke breaks on a laugh, even when it’s a thin, wet sound. Joy isn’t a big enough word for what he’s feeling. Elation, maybe. Euphoria.

Family.

“They—they want me to adopt her. Jean. They want—” He stumbles to a stop, glancing up at Nathan and babbling, “Can you even adopt a kid if they’re already yours?”

Nathan’s grin goes so wide, it’s second only to Duke’s. “Uh, considering that Audrey definitely faked that paperwork, I’m pretty sure you have to.”

Duke bubbles with laughter. He doesn’t even realize he’s crying until Nathan reaches over to brush a tear off his face.

“Never seen you that happy,” Nathan murmurs, his voice gone quiet and warm.

“Yeah,” Duke laughs, scrubbing his face with his sleeve. “Me neither.”

* * *

Duke has to persuade Nathan to come back to the Rouge that night—considering they spent their morning testing the limits of their own mortalities, Duke can’t really blame him for wanting to keep his distance. Convincing him otherwise involves a lot of sweettalk and no small amount of flattery.

It’s different at twilight, is the thing. The memories of that morning can’t hold up to the red sky against the water—all the stress slipping from the hull and into the waves.

Duke misses the ocean.

He likes—loves—living with Nathan. But it was easier to spend time on the water when he lived on it. Now, he has to make time and too often, he forgets. Gets caught up in other things.

But the sea was his first love, even before Nathan.

He’ll never be able to keep himself away from it.

“You know,” Duke muses as he joins Nathan on the deck, two mugs in hand, “the threat of certain death really felt like old times.”

Nathan stands at the railing, wind tousled and beautiful. It aches to look at him, just a little. Duke spent so many years dreaming of a future like this. Even in the darkest moments, when he was sure happy endings were nothing but a myth, when he couldn’t imagine a life for himself that wasn’t lonely and empty and dangerous—even then, a little corner of his heart kept wanting this.

Nathan. A kid. A _home_.

Nathan peeks over his shoulder and casts Duke a transparently adoring smile that makes his heart do something funny in his chest. “You gettin’ nostalgic on me, Duke Crocker?” He teases.

Nostalgic. Yeah.

Settling beside him at the railing, Duke passes Nathan a mug of coffee. “Me?” He scoffs, unable to keep the grin off his face. “Never. Don’t know the meaning of the word.”

Nathan eyes the coffee. “Spiked?” He asks. He blows across the surface of the coffee out of habit, even though he doesn’t have to guess about burning his tongue, anymore. Duke watches him, feeling something warm and fond light up his chest.

“Nah,” he answers. “Goin’ easy on the stuff.”

Nathan flashes him a smile, bumping their hips together. It’s not any grand gesture—just a simple, easy intimacy that makes Duke’s heart tumble. All at once, even side-by-side feels entirely too far away. Duke moves a little too sudden, missing the mark by half an inch when he tips forward to kiss him. Nathan makes a surprised sound. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Nathan nearly fumble the mug when he moves to line them up, fix the angle, cradle Duke’s face in his free hand and guide him into place.

It’s a soft, unhurried thing. Nathan’s hand shifts from Duke’s jaw to the back of his neck. Duke can feel him smile into the kiss when he reaches up and tugs Duke’s hair tie free so he can bury his fingers in his hair. Duke makes a sound too muffled by Nathan’s mouth to call a laugh and winds an arm around his waist, tugging him closer. He’s met with no resistance. Nathan goes, easy as anything. Looking at them, now, it’d be impossible to guess all the years of heartbreak and burned bridges between them.

Looking at them now, it’s hard to remember why those things ever mattered at all.

Nathan breaks the kiss, but he doesn’t go far. He cradles mug in both hands—Duke’s hair tie around his wrist—and stares warmly up at Duke; it’s a kind of naked affection Duke never thought he’d see leveled at him—certainly not by Nathan Wuornos. Not after everything that went wrong.

Nathan taps Duke’s ankle with the toe of his boot when he hums, “She’s in for a surprise when she gets back, huh?” Even though the thought comes out of nowhere, Duke immediately knows who Nathan’s talking about.

In some ways, everything comes back to Audrey. For the both of them. Even when it aches. Even when it aches in an awful, familiar way he can’t quite explain.

“You kidding?” Duke huffs. He runs his hand up Nathan’s back. “Bet she saw this coming a mile away.”

It shouldn’t hurt. It’s just—she knew them so well. Loved them so well. He isn’t sure they’ll ever get over her.

Nathan laughs at the joke, oblivious of the melancholy creeping in on the edges of Duke’s thoughts. “Yeah,” he concedes. “She probably did.”

She probably did.

Duke should be happy. He _is _happy—never in his entire life has he been this settled, or this wanted, or this happy. He’s grateful for it.

But it was supposed to be different.

It was never supposed to just be the two of them. Audrey tumbled into Haven and she changed everything—for the town, for the troubles, for them. Their happy ending always had room for three. Even now, it feels like they keep setting an extra seat at the table for a love that will never be able to meet them at it.

The hole she left behind feels suddenly, impossibly big. Two years spent trying to move forward without her, and they have. But when he looks right at it, nothing about that hurt has changed.

His hand finds Nathan’s hip, thumb stroking absently underneath the hem of his shirt. Duke can’t quite bear to look at him, in this moment—stares instead at the place where the water meets the sky and tries not to get too caught up in the dream of Audrey standing on the bow beside them.

“Sometimes,” Duke murmurs, “I think we never should have let her go in that barn. Troubles be damned.” It’s a selfish thought, but an honest one.

The day after they lost her, Nathan showed up at his door drunk and furious—accused Duke of letting her go. Nathan would have never stopped fighting for her if Duke hadn’t talked him down from it. They were backed into a corner, found out about the barn too late to _do _anything about it. And Duke had been furious and helpless and _heartbroken_, but that was all he could be. Couldn’t be a hero.

Anger boils up so fast and hot, it startles even him. He pulls away, kicks the railing, voice low and hurt when he snarls, “If Vince and Dave had just fucking _told_ us—if we’d had any _time_—”

“Got time, now,” Nathan says, his voice oddly serene. He catches Duke’s wrist and Duke turns in surprise, all that fury knocked out from underneath him. Nathan slides his grip down to Duke’s hand, lacing their fingers together. “Got twenty-five years to figure out how to fix it. Really fix it.”

Duke feels heavy with a hopelessness he hasn’t allowed himself to look at in years. “Didn’t do the rest of them any good,” he murmurs. “Not the Teagues and not the Chief.” He sighs, running his thumb along Nathan’s, trying to ground himself in that simple comfort. “Not tryin’ to put holes in your battleship, Nate, I just… I don’t know. They couldn’t do it, why can we?”

“They gave up,” Nathan says, just like that. Like it’s that simple. All at once, Duke feels a rush of fondness flood in from all sides. He loves this stupid, bullheaded, impossible, stubborn son of a bitch. It’s the one thing in their messed up lives that never changes. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I’m not going to,” Nathan continues. “This town’s been through enough. You got a kid who needs you. When Audrey comes back, we’re gonna have a plan. Get rid of the troubles for good.”

Too cautious to hope, Duke reminds him, “Won’t be Audrey.” It’s funny; not so long ago, they had an awfully similar conversation, but he was on the other side of it.

Nathan smiles, soft and certain. He reaches out to take the mug from Duke’s hands, setting both of them down on the railing. When he steps back into Duke’s space, winds his arms around his neck, it’s like he always belonged there. Like he’s a piece of a puzzle slotting into place.

Smiling up at Duke, he runs his thumb in soft circles along the nape of his neck. He hums a bright, easy, “Guess we’re gonna need a plan for that, too.”

Something settles in Duke’s chest—an unease he hadn’t even known the name of. “Yeah,” he agrees, pulling Nathan closer. “Got plenty of time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!!! It really would me the absolute world to me if you left a comment. I put so much love into this fic and I desperately want to know how it made people feel. If you have a second, it would really make all the difference.  
Thank you again. ❤❤❤


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